Staff Software Development Engineer

Job description

The Staff Software Development Engineer role within Clearwater’s Agentic Client Interactions & Orchestration (ACIO) is a senior technical leadership position focused on architecting, designing, and delivering large-scale distributed systems that power critical financial reporting and analytics. This role requires deep expertise in scalable system design, agentic architecture, cloud-native platforms, and high-performance data processing. You will play a key role in shaping the technical direction, ensuring architectural excellence, and enabling teams to build robust, maintainable systems that support Clearwater’s commitment to industry-leading financial reporting solutions. Senior engineers at this level are expected to think strategically, lead through influence, and drive innovations that scale across products and teams. Responsibilities: Architecture & Design Leadership Own the end-to-end architecture of Clearwater ACIO systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance in large-scale financial data processing. Define, document, and communicate architectural standards, patterns, and best practices for distributed systems. Evaluate and implement design patterns for fault tolerance, high availability, and horizontal scalability. Collaborate with product managers, data architects, and engineering teams to translate business requirements into system-level designs and technical roadmaps. Conduct architectural reviews and provide engineering guidance to ensure alignment with strategic technology vision. Technical Strategy & Delivery Lead the technical strategy, operational excellence, and professional delivery across multiple domains in Clearwater. Drive improvements in system observability, maintainability, and deployment automation. Ensure designs and implementations meet security, compliance, and performance benchmarks. Oversee execution of multi-team, multi-service projects, ensuring timely and high-quality delivery at scale. Mentorship & Collaboration Mentor senior and mid-level engineers in architecture thinking, technical design, and distributed systems development. Build strong relationships with teams across divisions to facilitate cross-system integration and shared technology improvements. Innovation & Continuous Improvement Stay abreast of industry trends, emerging architectures, and cloud technologies. Identify opportunities for re-architecting or optimizing existing systems to improve throughput, latency, and cost-efficiency. Foster a culture of innovation, scalability, and engineering excellence across FO Reporting and broader Clearwater teams. Required Skills & Qualifications: Proven architecture and design expertise in large-scale distributed systems, preferably in financial or analytics platforms. Exceptional leadership skills and ability to lead through influence as a technical architect or senior tech lead. Strong knowledge of microservices architecture, event-driven systems, and data streaming platforms (Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.). Hands-on experience with public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), including scaling, cost optimization, and multi-region deployments. Proficiency in one or more modern languages (Java, Python, Go, or similar) with deep understanding of concurrency, memory management, and performance tuning. Strong understanding of distributed data storage, database scaling, and query optimization techniques. Worked on agentic conversational UX design and architecture. Developed and deployed systems with complex SLAs in production environments serving high-volume traffic/data. Excellent communication skills with ability to clearly convey architectural decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Commitment to continuous technical learning, improvement, and community knowledge sharing. Education & Experience: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical discipline. 15+ years of professional software development experience; 5+ years acting in an architecture or principal engineering capacity. Track record of designing and implementing enterprise-grade distributed systems and owning them through full lifecycle (design → build → deploy → maintain).