Principal Architect, Core Platform

Our Company

At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. That’s why we built the most complete cloud analytics and data platform for AI. By delivering harmonized data, trusted AI, and faster innovation, we uplift and empower our customers—and our customers’ customers—to make better, more confident decisions. The world’s top companies across every major industry trust Teradata to improve business performance, enrich customer experiences, and fully integrate data across the enterprise.

What You’ll Do

We are seeking a Principal Architect / Distinguished Engineer to lead the strategic technical vision and architecture for our cloud platform’s elasticity, scalability, and resilience at Teradata. This role will serve with technical authority, driving innovation, influencing technology decisions across the organization, and ensuring our platform can dynamically scale to meet evolving product requirements.

The ideal candidate is an expert in cloud elasticity patterns, multi‑cloud capabilities, modern infrastructure architectures and has a deep understanding of the current market landscape, including the strengths and limitations of public cloud providers, managed services, and open‑source technologies.

The role combines distributed systems expertise with a deep understanding of cloud performance characteristics, around storage, networking, I/O, and compute resource behavior.

The role requires a deep understanding of data platform architecture and scalability tradeoffs. Teradata core platform is evolving with elastic compute, and our goal is to achieve greater elasticity by unlocking scalability in our environment. Ideal candidate will be able to assess these architectural constraints, propose strategic improvements, and lead efforts to enhance system elasticity through thoughtful, data‑driven platform modifications.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve the architectural blueprint for a highly elastic, self‑optimizing cloud platform.

• Develop frameworks and systems that support real‑time autoscaling, predictive scaling, capacity forecasting, and cost‑aware elasticity.

• Maintain a deep understanding of cloud provider offerings (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc.) and relevant industry tooling, including their performance characteristics, constraints, and roadmap directions.

• Evaluate emerging technologies, vendor solutions, and open‑source projects, identifying opportunities and gaps relative to our needs.

• Influence long‑term engineering strategy, collaborating with product, operations, and security teams to align architectural decisions with business goals.

• Mentor senior technical leaders and engineering teams; drive engineering excellence and establish best practices for scalable cloud architecture.

• Establish patterns for distributed systems that optimize workload placement, resource utilization, reliability, and failure recovery.

• Focus on cost efficiency by designing elasticity mechanisms that reduce waste without compromising performance or customer experience.

• Lead the creation of reference implementations, proofs‑of‑concept, and performance experiments to validate design decisions.

• Investigate platform constraints and collaborate with teams to design alternatives or mitigations.

• Define guardrails, standards, and tooling that ensure elasticity features are observable, testable, and production‑ready.

Who You’ll Work With

You will partner with Product Management and platform operations teams to ensure scalability capabilities integrate seamlessly with deployment pipelines and monitoring systems.

What Makes You a Qualified Candidate

• 10+ years in large‑scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, or platform engineering.

• Proven track record architecting high‑scale, elastic, multi‑region or multi‑cloud systems.

• Deep understanding of cloud provider elasticity primitives, orchestration systems (Kubernetes, serverless, autoscalers), and modern infrastructure technologies.

What You Will Bring

• Experience with hybrid or edge‑cloud architectures.

• Contributions to open‑source cloud infrastructure projects.

• Prior Distinguished Engineer or Principal Engineer experience in a large‑scale cloud‑native organization.

Why We Think You’ll Love Teradata

We prioritize a people‑first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well‑being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally. We are committed to actively working to foster an inclusive environment that celebrates people for all of who they are.

#LI-CP2

Teradata is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, ancestry, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related conditions), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, military and veteran status, or any other legally protected status. We welcome and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply and join our team, bringing their unique perspectives and experiences to help us innovate and grow.

Pay Rate: 217300.0000 - 271600.0000 - 325900.0000 Annually

Starting pay for the successful applicant will depend on geographic location, internal equity, job‑related knowledge, skills, and candidate experience. Sales roles will be eligible for commission payments tied to quota achievement. All other permanent roles will be eligible for one of our annual incentive plans, which are based on company financial attainment and individual performance.

Employees in this position are also eligible to participate in the Company’s comprehensive benefits programs, which include healthcare, life and disability insurance plans, a 401(k)-retirement savings plan, and time‑off programs. Specific details of these benefits, including eligibility criteria and plan options, will be provided during the hiring process and can be reviewed here: