StratusGrid

Lead architecture and hands-on development of data optimization products and platform systems, improving performance, reliability, and cost while collaborating with product teams, customers, and forward deployed engineers. | Requires 10+ years of experience, staff-level leadership, proven data-system optimization, deep relational database expertise, and familiarity with Apache Iceberg, distributed query engines, cloud infrastructure, testing, and observability. | Opportunity StratusGrid delivers a high-trust, high-competence customer experience around cloud optimization, and we're productizing that expertise into our agentic platform, Stratusphere. We are looking for a staff+ software engineer to help create the technical architecture and development of our data systems optimization products and integrations, while also shaping and improving the data systems behind Stratusphere itself. You will work across data systems and cloud infrastructure, contribute production code, and lead technical design for new features you develop. Partnering with product engineering, forward deployed engineers (FDEs), and customers, you will test and implement optimizations in real environments and turn proven approaches into reusable platform capabilities. Customer workloads range from a few gigabytes to many petabytes across AWS and Azure today, with additional clouds ahead. We are looking for a systems thinker with broad expertise, as our scope includes PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and Amazon Redshift, alongside lakehouse and analytical systems. Our current platform uses Apache Iceberg tables in Amazon S3 with Athena and Starburst. Experience with Databricks and other lakehouse and analytical platforms will help expand our capabilities. Responsibilities • Technical Architecture: Drive architecture, interfaces, and engineering standards for data optimization products. Lead technical design for new features you develop, communicate tradeoffs, guide implementation, and design for expansion across clouds and data systems. • Agent-First Product Development: Use and oversee AI agents to build, test, and mature Stratusphere features, backend services, customer integrations, analysis tools, and user-facing workflows. Contribute production code and improve the platform's own data architecture, performance, and reliability. • Data Systems Optimization: Diagnose bottlenecks across queries, schemas, indexes, caching, data layout, compute, storage, and networking. Evaluate sizing, scaling, concurrency, and workload changes against customer performance, reliability, governance, and cost goals. • Customer Validation & Product Partnership: Work with FDEs, Product, and customer teams to identify opportunities, establish baselines, test hypotheses, and implement optimizations. Measure results, document tradeoffs, and turn repeatable findings into roadmap priorities, features, and integrations. • Engineering Judgment & Safe Automation: Take responsibility for AI-generated plans, code, queries, and recommendations. Ensure implementations are tested, maintainable, scalable, and secure, with appropriate access boundaries, change controls, auditability, and rollback. • Agent Improvement Feedback Loop: Identify recurring agent errors and missing context. Improve architecture, tooling, prompts, evaluation criteria, and workflows with Product and FDEs to measurably improve analysis quality and execution safety. • Add to the Foundation: Stay current with the latest methods and best practices for improving velocity, quality, and maintainability with agent-first development approaches. Share knowledge and actively contribute to maturing the processes, standards, and tooling that make the whole team better. • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Share context in visible channels, ask questions early, and work openly with Engineering, Product, FDEs, and customers. Surface assumptions and disagreements constructively so teams can learn quickly and make informed decisions. • Execution with Reliability & Urgency: Own work end to end, capture commitments, communicate progress proactively, escalate risks early, and close the loop. Follow change-control and customer experience standards, maintain clear documentation, and keep work records current. Requirements • Staff-Level Technical Leadership: Demonstrated ownership of architecture and implementation for complex production systems, with the ability to guide decisions across teams, influence through clear reasoning, and remain deeply hands-on. • Proven Optimization Results: A track record of improving complex data systems using profiling, query plans, observability, and representative benchmarks. Explain measured improvements in latency, throughput, reliability, or cost and the tradeoffs involved. • Multifaceted Data Systems Expertise: Deep relational database expertise and substantial optimization experience in at least one additional category: search, document or key-value systems, or analytical platforms. Strong SQL, data modeling, indexing, and distributed systems fundamentals. • Iceberg & Query Engines: Hands-on familiarity with Apache Iceberg and distributed query engines such as Athena, Starburst, or Trino. Understand partitioning, file sizing and compaction, metadata and statistics, and their effects on performance and cost. • Software Engineering & Adaptability: Deep proficiency in at least one programming language and the ability to contribute across backend services, APIs, integrations, and frontend workflows. Learn new languages, frameworks, and data systems quickly and critically review AI-assisted work across the stack. • Testing & CI/CD: Architect services for layered testing and build automated delivery checks that catch defects early. Validate correctness, performance, and failure behavior while developing rapidly with AI agents. • Observability: Integrate and use metrics, logs, traces, and data-system diagnostics to investigate complex problems, establish baselines, and verify improvements in production. • Cloud & Infrastructure Engineering: Experience working in production cloud environments and managing infrastructure with infrastructure as code (IaC). • AI as a Daily Tool: Use AI and coding agents effectively for analysis, planning, implementation, and testing. Take ownership of AI-assisted work and remain accountable for its quality, security, and cost. • Excellent Communication: Translate complex findings into clear technical and business decisions. Listen to customer concerns, explain risks and tradeoffs with empathy, and turn incomplete information into actionable next steps. • Startup Environment & Ambiguity: Operate effectively in a fast-paced startup with evolving priorities and incomplete requirements. Identify the most valuable problems, make pragmatic decisions, test assumptions, and deliver in useful increments while maintaining engineering quality and customer trust. • Strong Ownership & Urgency: Take initiative without waiting for detailed direction, meet commitments, adapt priorities thoughtfully, and communicate status and risks early. Balance delivery speed with reliability, maintainability, and follow-through. • Travel: Willingness and ability to travel to our Chattanooga, Tennessee headquarters quarterly, with flexibility to travel up to monthly as needed for collaboration and team planning. • Remote-Work-Ready: This is a remote role. Work effectively in a distributed team with reliable high-speed internet, a professional workspace, and the ability to communicate, collaborate, and execute independently. • Work Authorization & Customer Access: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire. Must be eligible and able to meet applicable customer requirements for working in GovCloud and CJIS-regulated environments, including required background screening, security training, and access restrictions. Nice-to-have / differentiators • Databricks & Analytics: Databricks experience is strongly preferred, including Spark, Delta Lake, and workload optimization. Experience with other lakehouse and analytical platforms, such as Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse Analytics, Google BigQuery, or Amazon Redshift, is also valuable. • Application Stack & Caching: TypeScript, React/Next.js, and Python; caching systems and strategies; and experience building reusable optimization tooling or customer-facing data products. • Data Pipelines & Operations: Experience building high-quality, cost-effective data pipelines with tools such as dbt, together with strong DevOps practices and familiarity with policy as code. • Emerging Data Capabilities: Familiarity with graph data models and databases, vector search, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), including performance and retrieval-quality tradeoffs. • Location: Ideally located in the Chattanooga, Nashville, Atlanta, or Knoxville area to support quarterly collaboration at Chattanooga HQ, with flexibility for visits up to monthly. Benefits At StratusGrid, we invest in the health, well-being, and growth of our team. We offer competitive pay and a flexible benefits package that supports employees and their families at every stage. Full-time employees receive: • Competitive salary • Medical, dental, and vision insurance • Life insurance and short-term and long-term disability coverage • 401(k) plan • Flexible PTO, paid sick leave, and paid holidays Benefits may vary by location and employment status. Equal opportunity & fair chance hiring StratusGrid is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with applicable laws, including the California Fair Chance Act. Accommodations StratusGrid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process. If you need an accommodation, please note it in your application or contact us through our website. About StratusGrid StratusGrid is building Stratusphere, a multi-agent platform that turns cloud complexity into measurable outcomes. Stratusphere coordinates specialized infrastructure agents to observe AWS and Azure environments, simulate policy-safe plans, and execute approved changes with auditability and rollback-ready safety, so savings compound over time, security improves, delivery accelerates, and teams spend less time on toil and fire drills. We're a team of builders and operators who care about trustworthy automation and real business impact. Our work sits at the intersection of cloud engineering, product, and customer outcomes, helping customers make infrastructure changes they can measure, explain, and stand behind. We'd love to meet you! #StratusGrid

You would guide customers through onboarding and adoption of a cloud optimization platform, coordinate with internal teams, and relay customer insights to improve the product. | The role requires 5–10 years of customer-facing experience in B2B SaaS, cloud, or technical services, along with strong communication, problem-solving, and project management skills. | Opportunity StratusGrid delivers a high-trust, high-competence customer experience around cloud optimization, and we're productizing that expertise into our agentic platform, Stratusphere. This role is for a customer-facing operator who can turn cloud optimization from a program customers participate in into a product experience they understand, trust, and use independently. You will be the connective tissue between customers, PE sponsors, Service Delivery, Product, Engineering, and Sales, helping customers onboard successfully, adopt Stratusphere, approve savings opportunities, and realize measurable value faster. Along the way, you'll identify where customers are getting stuck, reduce friction in the approval process, and bring structured field insights back to Product so the platform keeps getting better. This is a hands-on role for someone who is proactive, highly organized, curious about technology, and comfortable navigating ambiguity. The best fit will know how to build trust with executives and project teams alike, anticipate customer needs before they are stated, and turn repeatable customer success motions into scalable systems. Responsibilities • Customer Engagement & Relationship Ownership: Serve as the primary point of contact for customers throughout onboarding, active optimization, and ongoing program engagement. Build strong relationships through proactive communication, thoughtful follow-through, and genuine ownership of the customer experience. • Drive Stratusphere Adoption: Help customers understand the purpose of Stratusphere, how to use it, and how it fits into their cloud optimization workflow. Own product demos, user and team setup, dashboard configuration, training, and ongoing enablement so customers are confident using the platform async. • End-to-End Customer Onboarding: Own customer onboarding from kickoff through successful program activation using our documented onboarding process. This includes cloud environment integration coordination, program overview, roles and responsibilities, billing process, common risks, success expectations, user setup, team setup, and customer-facing documentation. When troubleshooting goes beyond the documented steps, bring in a Forward Deployed Engineer to resolve it. • Improve Time to Approval: Partner closely with Service Delivery and customer stakeholders to understand where savings opportunities are getting stuck. Identify approval roadblocks, information gaps, unclear recommendations, stakeholder misalignment, or process friction, then coordinate the right next steps to help customers make decisions faster. • Customer Reporting & Business Reviews: Deliver clear, useful customer reporting, including weekly updates, program success reports, KPI dashboards, savings progress, approval status, engagement trends, and executive-level summaries. Translate product usage and savings activity into business outcomes customers and PE sponsors can understand. • PE Firm Relationship Management: Support and manage reporting cadences with PE firms, sharing portco program successes, challenges, risks, and progress. Navigate the balance between PE firm expectations and portco realities with credibility, judgment, and care. • Voice of the Customer: Capture customer feedback, pain points, objections, feature requests, and recurring patterns from the field. Translate that input into clear, evidence-backed insights for Product, Engineering, and Service Delivery so Stratusphere improves based on real customer needs, not guesswork. • Prototype Testing & Product Feedback: Build lightweight prototypes with AI tools and test product ideas, workflows, messaging, and dashboards with customers. Start the conversation, gather customer goals, and bring in a Forward Deployed Engineer once discussions move into technical requirements and design detail. Report learnings back to Product to inform prioritization and roadmap decisions. • Technical Partnership: Recognize when a customer needs technical depth and bring in the right Forward Deployed Engineer at the right time. Use AI tools as a first line of support for technical questions, and keep the customer informed while engineering works the issue. • Customer Health & Risk Monitoring: Monitor engagement health, approval velocity, product usage, customer satisfaction, and other risk signals. Proactively identify disengagement, slow approvals, unclear ownership, or declining momentum before they become churn risks. • Reduce Customer Effort: Think one step ahead of customers, anticipate where they may need help, and fill gaps before they become blockers. Make it easier for customers to understand opportunities, make decisions, involve the right stakeholders, and realize value. • Customer Education & Documentation: Create and maintain customer-facing documentation, FAQs, onboarding guides, user guides, training materials, and repeatable playbooks that help customers use Stratusphere independently and help StratusGrid scale what works. • AI-Enabled Customer Success: Use AI tools daily to accelerate customer research, reporting, documentation, analysis, workflow design, and communication. Identify recurring work that can be automated, document successful strategies, and help turn repeatable customer success motions into scalable systems. • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with Service Delivery, Product, Engineering, Sales, and leadership to coordinate customer actions, escalate risks, share field context, and improve the overall customer experience. Maintain strong operating hygiene in Linear, customer records, dashboards, and internal updates. • Operational Excellence & Follow-Through: Own commitments end to end. Communicate clearly, escalate early, close loops visibly, and ensure customers and internal teams always understand status, next steps, risks, and owners. Requirements • Customer-Facing Experience: Proven experience in customer success, account management, implementation, client services, or a similar customer-facing role supporting B2B SaaS, cloud, infrastructure, FinOps, or technical services customers. • Customer Outcome Orientation: Genuine passion for helping customers achieve measurable business outcomes. Ability to stay focused on value realization, adoption, satisfaction, and long-term customer health rather than activity alone. • Executive Communication & Credibility: Ability to communicate effectively with C-suite stakeholders, technical leaders, operating partners, finance teams, and project teams. Comfortable leading discussions with executives and translating technical progress into business impact. • Comfort with Technical Topics: Willing to learn cloud and cost optimization concepts well enough to follow customer conversations, ask good questions, and spot when an engineer is needed. Deep technical expertise isn't required; our Forward Deployed Engineers provide technical depth when customers need it. • Ability to Simplify Complexity: Exceptional ability to explain savings opportunities, cloud optimization tradeoffs, product workflows, and program expectations in plain language without losing accuracy or credibility. • Data & Reporting Capability: Experience interpreting metrics, building or configuring dashboards, identifying trends, and using data to drive customer behavior. Comfortable reporting on adoption, engagement, savings, approval velocity, customer health, and program outcomes. • Product Adoption & Enablement Skills: Demonstrated ability to onboard users, train teams, drive product usage, increase customer independence, and help customers realize value through self-serve or async product workflows. • Problem Solving & Systems Thinking: Strong ability to break down ambiguous customer problems, identify root causes, propose practical solutions, and balance customer needs with operational, product, and engineering constraints. • Relationship Navigation & Judgment: Able to read the room, detect unstated concerns, navigate conflict, and balance the needs of customers, PE sponsors, and internal teams. Strong judgment around when to push, when to support, and when to escalate. • Voice-of-Customer Discipline: Ability to distinguish anecdotes from patterns, gather evidence, test hypotheses, and turn customer feedback into useful product and operational insights. • Prototype & Experimentation Mindset: Comfortable testing early ideas, workflows, messaging, dashboards, or lightweight prototypes with customers and using the results to inform better decisions. • Strong Ownership & Urgency: Track record of proactively driving work forward, following through on commitments, communicating risks early, and operating effectively in fast-moving environments with incomplete information. • AI as a Daily Tool: Demonstrated habit of using AI tools to improve speed, quality, analysis, documentation, communication, and repeatability while maintaining strong judgment and verification. • Remote-Work-Ready: Equipped to work effectively in a distributed team, including a reliable high-speed internet connection, a professional and distraction-limited workspace, and the ability to consistently communicate, collaborate, and execute independently. • Travel: Willingness and ability to travel periodically, as needed, for customer engagements, PE firm meetings, team planning sessions, or onsite work. • Work Authorization: Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of hire. This position does not offer visa sponsorship. Nice-to-have / differentiators • Experience supporting cloud optimization, FinOps, infrastructure automation, DevOps, platform engineering, or enterprise cloud programs. • Familiarity with AWS and Azure environments, native cost tools, cloud billing concepts, savings opportunities, reservations, Savings Plans, rightsizing, storage optimization, and common cloud cost management workflows. • Experience working with Private Equity firms, PE-backed companies, executive sponsors, finance leaders, or multi-stakeholder enterprise accounts. • Experience building customer health models, adoption dashboards, executive business review materials, NPS programs, G2/review motions, or customer success operating cadences. • Experience using product analytics, telemetry, DAU/WAU/MAU, feature usage, onboarding metrics, time-to-value metrics, or engagement data to improve adoption. • Experience partnering closely with Product and Engineering teams to shape roadmap priorities based on customer evidence. • Experience creating scalable customer documentation, onboarding playbooks, FAQs, training materials, internal enablement content, or self-serve product education. • Experience with tools such as Linear, HubSpot, Salesforce, Gainsight, ChurnZero, Looker, Power BI, Tableau, Hex, Metabase, or similar customer, product, and reporting systems. • Strong writing ability, especially for executive updates, customer-facing summaries, technical explanations, success reports, and concise internal handoffs. • Comfort designing lightweight workflows, mockups, dashboards, or prototypes to test customer pain points before product investment. Benefits At StratusGrid, we invest in the health, well-being, and growth of our team. We offer competitive pay and a flexible benefits package that supports employees and their families at every stage. Full-time employees receive: • Competitive salary • Medical, dental, and vision insurance • Life insurance and short-term and long-term disability coverage • 401(k) plan • Flexible PTO, paid sick leave, and paid holidays Benefits may vary by location and employment status. Equal opportunity & fair chance hiring StratusGrid is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with applicable laws, including the California Fair Chance Act. Accommodations StratusGrid is committed to providing reasonable accommodations throughout the hiring process. If you need an accommodation, please note it in your application or contact us through our website. About StratusGrid StratusGrid is building Stratusphere, a multi-agent platform that turns cloud complexity into measurable outcomes. Stratusphere coordinates specialized infrastructure agents to observe AWS and Azure environments, simulate policy-safe plans, and execute approved changes with auditability and rollback-ready safety, so savings compound over time, security improves, delivery accelerates, and teams spend less time on toil and fire drills. We're a team of builders and operators who care about trustworthy automation and real business impact. Our work sits at the intersection of cloud engineering, product, and customer outcomes, helping customers make infrastructure changes they can measure, explain, and stand behind. We'd love to meet you! #StratusGrid