Cloud Control Plane Engineer

Join a small advanced research team within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer focused on shaping the next generation of Teradata's platform. This role centers on the control layer — how systems are orchestrated, coordinated, and exposed. You'll design and build services that manage lifecycle, define system behavior, and provide the interfaces through which infrastructure is controlled and consumed. Working in a greenfield environment, you'll help define how the control plane operates — from provisioning and scaling to secure exposure. These systems are intended to support highly scalable workloads and evolve into customer-facing capabilities. You'll be working in areas where scale introduces new constraints, and system behavior under coordination and change is as important as correctness. You'll operate with significant ownership, using AI-assisted tools to explore and implement designs quickly while ensuring coherence and reliability.

Responsibilities

Design and build control plane systems responsible for lifecycle management, orchestration, and coordination of distributed infrastructure; Define how infrastructure is provisioned, scaled, and managed through APIs and service-based interfaces; Shape system behavior around scaling, availability, and multi-environment operation; Design identity and access models, including integration patterns with systems such as OIDC, SAML, or similar frameworks; Build or extend control mechanisms such as controllers, coordination services, or workflow-driven provisioning systems; Contribute to runtime-driven provisioning and lifecycle workflows that respond to system demand; Use AI-assisted tools to accelerate development and explore implementation approaches; Collaborate with infrastructure engineering to define clear boundaries between system layers

Requirements

Experience designing and building distributed systems, platform services, or control layers; Strong familiarity with Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures; Experience designing APIs, service orchestration, and system coordination patterns; Understanding of identity, access, and security models in distributed systems (e.g., OIDC, SAML, or similar); Programming experience in a backend language (e.g., Go, Java, Python, or similar); Experience designing systems with scalability, reliability, and strong cost-performance characteristics; Comfort working in environments where architecture and system boundaries are still being defined; Experience building systems that other engineers or customers depend on to operate reliably at scale; Experience designing coordination or control systems that manage complex infrastructure behavior; Understanding of system interactions beyond individual services; Motivation to shape platforms early where decisions define long-term behavior; AI-assisted development fluency

Nice to have

Background in big data, data pipelines, or analytical platforms; Familiarity with query engine or analytical database architectures (DataFusion, Trino, Presto, Spark, or similar); Experience adapting or extending open-source control planes (Kubernetes operators, custom controllers, service mesh configurations); Experience with eBPF, kernel performance tuning, or NUMA-aware hardware configuration

Benefits

Greenfield opportunity to define how the control plane of a next-generation platform operates; Real ownership; Work alongside engineers who've operated systems at massive scale; Use AI tooling as a force multiplier; People-first culture; Flexible work model; Focus on well-being; Anti-racist company; Dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Healthcare; Life and disability insurance; Retirement savings; 401(k)-retirement savings plan; Time-off programs; Eligibility for annual incentive plans