Senior Software Engineer (Data Platform, C++)

The role

We’re looking for a Software Engineer with strong C++ expertise to join the team building and operating Nebius Data Platform — a distributed storage and a processing platform that acts as the company’s “source of truth” and the backbone of many internal (and some external) products.

Nebius Data Platform is a single multi-tenant ecosystem based on YTsaurus — instead of running separate HDFS/Kafka/HBase-style systems, we provide storage, compute, and analytics capabilities inside one platform.

Built on top of the open-source YTsaurus ecosystem, we run and extend our own Nebius distribution and develop significant in-house functionality (core and platform-level). We can design, implement, and roll out features end-to-end on our clusters without waiting for upstream approvals and contribute upstream when it makes sense.

At scale today, this includes~500 servers, ~20k CPU cores and ~10 PB of compressed data in our largest production cluster, supporting workloads ranging from business-critical pipelines and financial transactions to large-scale ML/LLM training datasets and compute.

What’s inside the platform

You’ll work on a system that includes (and ties together):

• Distributed Storage (Cypress): transactional semantics, tiered storage, erasure coding, replication, and strong reliability expectations.
• Compute & ETL: a cluster-wide job scheduler (tens of thousands of cores), MapReduce, YQL for SQL-like data processing, and SPYT (Spark over YTsaurus) for modern data engineering.
• Interactive analytics (CHYT): ClickHouse® instances spun up directly on compute nodes for fast SQL over data in-place.
• Dynamic Tables: low-latency NoSQL KV with distributed ACID transactions for OLTP-style workloads and feature stores.
• Orchestracto: workflow orchestration deeply integrated with the platform (Airflow-like, but platform-native).

What you’ll do

We’re looking for engineers who combine strong systems skills with product sense: understanding who uses the platform, why certain capabilities matter, and making pragmatic trade-offs to maximize impact. On our team, engineering work is expected to be connected to real users and outcomes — you’ll regularly align with internal stakeholders, clarify requirements, and help drive prioritization.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement new functionality in YTsaurus core (C++) with production reliability in mind.
• Build and evolve platform-level capabilities: platform architecture and operating model—multi-cluster growth, shared primitives, and a consistent experience that scales with new teams and use cases.
• Improve end-to-end platform experience for internal (and external-facing) users: APIs, guardrails, debugging workflows, and automation.
• Own production quality: incident response / on-call rotation, root cause analysis, and turning learnings into durable fixes.

Example projects

• Roll out sharded YTsaurus masters (incl. Kubernetes operator support) and build automatic balancing of metadata across master cells (consensus groups) to remove control-plane bottlenecks and unlock 10–100x cluster growth.
• Make CHYT interactive SQL faster and more predictable at high load via performance work like data-skipping / min-max-style indexes and improved execution introspection.
• Turn Orchestracto into a platform product by defining the building blocks, developer experience, and governance for how teams create and share workflows.
• Scale and harden Parquet-on-S3 for native YTsaurus workloads by tackling replication/movement, consistent lifecycle semantics, and master-server metadata optimizations for performance and reliability.
• Design and ship complete, trustworthy audit trails for data changes (who/what/when) across heterogeneous storage and compute paths.

Tech stack

• Core: modern C++ (C++20, async + multithreaded primitives)
• Services & tooling: Go and Python (microservices, utilities, integration tests)

What we expect

• 5+ years of software engineering experience.
• Strong C++ skills (you’ll write core code).
• Working knowledge of Python and/or Go (you don’t have to be expert, but should be comfortable navigating them).
• Experience developing and/or operating high-load, distributed services.
• Production mindset: ability to use SSH, read logs/metrics/traces, and debug distributed systems behavior.
• Solid CS fundamentals: algorithms, data structures, concurrency basics.

Nice to have

• Experience with Big Data systems (YTsaurus/Hadoop/Spark/ClickHouse/Kafka-like ecosystems).
• Experience with multi-tenant platforms, schedulers, resource isolation, quotas, and reliability engineering.
• Strong performance engineering skills (profiling, lock contention, latency/throughput tradeoffs).

We conduct coding interviews as part of the process.