Staff Software Development Engineer

TheStaff Software Development Engineerrole withinClearwater's Agentic Client Interactions & Orchestration(ACIO) is a senior technical leadership position focused onarchitecting, designing, and delivering large-scale distributed systemsthat power critical financial reporting and analytics. This role requires deep expertise inscalable 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 toindustry-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 theend-to-end architectureof 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 ofmulti-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

• Provenarchitecture and design expertiseinlarge-scale distributed systems, preferably in financial or analytics platforms.
• Exceptional leadership skills and ability to lead through influence as atechnical architect or senior tech lead.
• Strong knowledge ofmicroservices architecture,event-driven systems, anddata streaming platforms(Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.).
• Hands-on experience withpublic 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 ofdistributed data storage,database scaling, andquery optimizationtechniques.
• 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+ yearsof professional software development experience;5+ yearsacting in an architecture or principal engineering capacity.
• Track record ofdesigning and implementing enterprise-grade distributed systemsand owning them through full lifecycle (design build deploy maintain).