Staff Software Engineer - Connectivity

Role overview A senior engineering position on the Connectivity team responsible for the client drivers, protocols, connectors, and interoperability layers that move data in and out of a lakehouse platform. The role owns multiple medium-to-large features end-to-end, translates ambiguous goals into clear milestones, and drives production-grade delivery across distributed systems. It is suited for an engineer with deep expertise in at least one connectivity area who can influence partner teams and mentor others.

Responsibilities - Lead several medium-to-large features or service components from problem definition through design, implementation, validation, release readiness, and operational handoff. - Define reviewable milestones, acceptance measures, dependencies, estimates, and risks for complex customer, product, and engineering goals. - Produce technical designs and architecture diagrams, explain trade-offs, and make feature and service-level decisions across drivers, protocols, client libraries, connectors, and distributed services. - Lead root-cause analysis across client/server, protocol, network, authentication, metadata, and distributed-system boundaries using logs, telemetry, profiles, benchmarks, and production evidence. - Maintain API and protocol stability and build automated compatibility, interoperability, performance, reliability, observability, and diagnostics coverage. - Partner with product, query execution, QA, support, SRE, documentation, and external technology partners; mentor engineers; contribute to relevant upstream open-source projects where aligned with platform priorities.

Requirements - 8+ years of production software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained ownership of complex systems. - Deep proficiency in Java, C++, Rust, Go, or another systems or services language, with ability to work in adjacent languages and frameworks. - Experience designing and debugging APIs, protocols, client libraries, drivers, or distributed services, with strong knowledge of data structures, concurrency, asynchronous programming, networking, and failure handling. - Ability to identify and solve non-obvious problems across client/server and distributed-system boundaries and translate findings into durable fixes and regression coverage. - Experience building comprehensive unit, integration, compatibility, performance, or reliability tests and working with production CI/CD, packaging, release, and certification controls. - Clear written and verbal communication, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs, surface risks early, and influence without formal authority; demonstrated mentorship ability.

Nice to have - Background with database drivers such as JDBC or ODBC, Apache Arrow, or Arrow Flight SQL. - Familiarity with SQL engines, databases, data platforms, source connectors, or BI interoperability with tools like Power BI, Tableau, or Excel. - Knowledge of OAuth, OIDC, TLS, enterprise authentication, metadata discovery, or query pushdown. - Cross-platform native build, packaging, release engineering, compatibility certification, or upgrade support experience. - Observability, production diagnostics, long-running data transfer, cancellation, keepalive, timeout, or proxy experience. - Contributions to Apache Arrow or other relevant open-source projects.