Staff Escalation Resolution Engineer

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Seniority Level:

Job Description: 

At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry.  Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.

The Staff Escalation Resolution Engineer (ERE) team is a specialized engineering-focused team within Support, dedicated to issue resolution for critical customer engineering escalations in Cloudera’s Storage components. Initially focusing on Ozone but expanding to all components (HDFS, HBase, Zookeeper, Phoenix, Solr, Ozone). This team operates as the first line of engineering escalation, proactively resolving complex issues without escalating to Product Engineering, thus improving the overall customer experience.

EREs will proactively work to prevent future escalations by identifying patterns, knowledge gaps, enablement opportunities, and process improvements to enhance overall support efficiency and customer experience.

The ideal candidate is an engineer with strong interpersonal skills, who can collaborate cross-functionally, perform deep troubleshooting analysis, provide transparent updates to Support, and actively contribute to customer success. They should be comfortable working on multiple storage technologies, digging deep into technical problems, and identifying patterns to drive long-term improvements.

If you enjoy troubleshooting complex distributed systems, engaging with customers, and solving real-world technical challenges, this is the role for you.

As a Staff Escalation Resolution Engineer You will:

• Act as the primary point of contact for Storage-related engineering escalations.

• Debug, troubleshoot, and resolve highly complex issues across Ozone, HDFS, HBase, Solr, etc.

• Work closely with frontline Support teams to provide real-time guidance and improve case resolution efficiency.

• Identify recurring case patterns and provide enablement sessions to Support to reduce unnecessary engineering escalations.

• Contribute to the Apache open-source project by reporting defects based on escalations and occasionally contributing patches.

• Conduct training sessions to improve Support engineers’ troubleshooting capabilities.

• Identify opportunities for product enhancements to reduce recurring customer issues.

• The team provides business hours coverage (Monday to Friday) to ensure continuous support across time zones. Weekend coverage will be done on a rotation basis to support critical escalations.

We are excited if you have:

• Hands-on experience with one or more of the following:

  • HDFS, HBase, Ozone (with a willingness to learn the other technologies in the Cloudera stack).

• Strong troubleshooting, issue reproduction and debugging skills in distributed storage systems.

• Experience in log analysis, performance tuning, and root cause analysis (RCA).

• Strong interpersonal and communication skills—able to collaborate across teams and provide clear updates.

• Ability to engage with customers on technical topics and explain solutions clearly.

• Good understanding of advanced algorithms and data structures

• Experience with Java or C++ programming

• Experience with performance troubleshooting

You may also have:

• Prior experience in Professional Services, Support Engineering, Escalations, or Site Reliability Engineering (SRE).

• Experience working in high-touch, customer-facing environments handling enterprise-scale support cases.

• Knowledge of distributed storage internals and best practices.

• Experience with JVM internals

What you can expect from us:

• Generous PTO Policy 

• Support work life balance with Unplugged Days

• Flexible WFH Policy 

• Mental & Physical Wellness programs 

• Phone and Internet Reimbursement program 

• Access to Continued Career Development 

• Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages 

• Paid Volunteer Time

• Employee Resource Groups

Cloudera is an Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, protected veteran status, or disability status.

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