---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Platform at Zilliz'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cloud-platform-zilliz-redwood-city-f8sagdsxspja'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Platform at Zilliz

- **Company:** Zilliz
- **Location:** Redwood City, CA
- **Compensation:** $175k–$225k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-06-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/zilliz/193ba194-6df6-4894-9f1b-05ace809c60a

## Job description

Zilliz is a fast-growing startup developing the industry’s leading vector database for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world’s most popular open-source vector database, the company builds next-generation database technologies to help organizations quickly create AI applications. On a mission to democratize AI, Zilliz is committed to simplifying data management for AI applications and making vector databases accessible to every organization.

We're entering our next phase of 10x growth: more customers, larger datasets, more complex AI workloads, and higher expectations for reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. You'll join a small, fast-moving Cloud Platform team building the core platform capabilities that run Zilliz Cloud at scale across multi-cloud environments. This is not a standard control-plane platform role. You will work across both the cloud platform and database runtime, building cloud-and-engine integrated systems around Vector Lakebase so AI workloads can be scheduled faster, run more reliably, and serve real customers more efficiently.

What you'll do:

- Design and build the cloud platform behind Zilliz Cloud and Vector Lakebase, bringing together cloud control plane, database runtime, scheduling, resource management, deployment, and lifecycle management to support fast workload placement, elastic scaling, multi-tenant isolation, and cost-efficient execution
- Build cloud-native systems that make distributed database provisioning, scaling, upgrades, recovery, and workload migration automated, observable, rollback-safe, and efficient
- Work deep across Kubernetes, multi-cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and database engine runtimes to deliver a tightly integrated cloud-and-engine product experience
- Improve platform scalability, reliability, performance, and operational simplicity as we grow across customers, regions, tenants, datasets, and AI workloads
- Partner with database, reliability, and product engineers to bring new Vector Lakebase capabilities into cloud production safely and quickly
- Use AI deeply across the platform engineering workflow, including deployment validation, diagnosis, incident analysis, capacity planning, documentation, code generation, and operational tooling

What we're looking for:

- 3+ years of experience building production systems such as large-scale SaaS platforms, data platforms, AI applications, microservices, or cloud infrastructure
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and at least one major cloud platform such as AWS, GCP, or Azure
- Familiarity with infrastructure automation and cloud operations tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Argo CD, Prometheus, Grafana, CI/CD systems, or similar tools
- Experience building cloud-native platform systems is a strong plus, including scheduling, orchestration, deployment, configuration, upgrades, lifecycle management, or resource management
- Understanding of distributed databases or database engine internals is a strong plus, especially around scalability, performance, reliability, and multi-tenant isolation
- Strong interest in AI-assisted development and engineering productivity. We value engineers who actively use AI to multiply their output across coding, debugging, testing, documentation, and operations

How we operate:

High ownership: You own platform outcomes end-to-end, from design to production behavior, not just a narrow slice of the system

AI-first engineering: We actively use AI to improve coding, testing, documentation, diagnosis, and operations, but human engineering taste still matters most

Fast and focused: We ship often while keeping a high bar. This team suits engineers who want speed, autonomy, and a steep growth curve

Global collaboration: We work closely with engineering teams across APAC and the US, designing collaboration around timezone coverage to support customers globally

Benefits:

- Competitive compensation (cash + equity)
- Regular bonus and equity refresh opportunities
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Paid time off, including vacation, sick leave, and global reset/wellbeing days
- Generous 401(k) and regional retirement plans

Zilliz is an Equal Opportunity Employer and welcomes people from all backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, or length of time spent unemployed.

## About Zilliz

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Zilliz builds the world’s most popular open-source vector database, Milvus, and offers a fully managed Vector Lakebase to power enterprise AI applications at any scale.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series B, $113M total funding)
- **Headquarters**: Redwood City, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2017
- **Founders**: Charles Xie (CEO) and James Luan (CTO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Vector database management, AI infrastructure, software development
- **Target customers**: B2B enterprise (10,000+ enterprise users)
- **Mission**: To make vector database capabilities accessible to every developer and organization, helping them harness unstructured data for AI/ML applications.

## Products & Services
- **[Milvus (Open-Source Vector Database)](https://zilliz.com/about)**: The leading open-source vector database, originally created by Zilliz and hosted under LF AI. Enables billion-scale similarity search, hybrid retrieval (vector, text, JSON, geospatial), and is production-tested across thousands of enterprises.
- **[Zilliz Vector Lakebase](https://zilliz.com/)**: A fully managed cloud service built on Milvus that unifies real-time vector search, lake-scale discovery, and AI data operations. Features include on-demand pay-per-query pricing, hot-cache on S3 for 90% cost reduction, multi-tenancy, and seamless backfill/schema iteration.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $113 million; annual revenue estimated at $2.2 million (as of latest report)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Series A led by 5Y Capital (2018); Series B led by Hillhouse Investment ($43M, 2020); Series B extension led by Prosperity7 Ventures ($60M, 2022)
- **Growth Signals**: 91 employees (8.9% YoY growth); 25,000+ LinkedIn followers (100% yearly growth); 10 active job postings (42.9% increase YoY); offices in Redwood City, New York, Shanghai, London, Berlin, Singapore

## Competitive Advantages
- **Open-source ecosystem**: Milvus is the most widely adopted open-source vector database, with a strong community and 10,000+ enterprise users.
- **Proven at scale**: Production-tested over 8 years, handling 100B+ entities and 10K+ QPS with consistent latency.
- **Cost efficiency**: All data/indexes stored on S3 with hot cache; on-demand compute reduces costs by up to 90%.
- **Full-spectrum search**: Supports hybrid retrieval combining vector, text, JSON, and geospatial queries with filtering and reranking.
- **Vortex format**: An open, next-gen storage format that delivers up to 10x faster random reads than Lance, with per-column flexibility.

## Strategic Focus
- **Enterprise AI adoption**: Expanding the Vector Lakebase to serve massive multi-tenancy, global replication, and low-latency access for AI applications.
- **Global expansion**: Multi-region deployment and offices across the US, Europe, and Asia to support worldwide AI scaling.
- **Continuous innovation**: Investing in research (vector index research roles) and cloud platform reliability to maintain leadership in vector database technology.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Deep technical culture built by the creators of Milvus; engineers and scientists focused on advancing AI and data infrastructure.
- **Work model**: Hybrid/remote opportunities available; offices in Redwood City, New York, Shanghai, London, Berlin, and Singapore.
- **Benefits**: Competitive compensation (cash + equity), regular bonus and equity refresh, comprehensive medical/dental/vision, generous PTO, 401(k) and regional retirement plans, and paid sick leave.
- **Engineering culture**: Work on cutting-edge technology at the intersection of databases and AI, with opportunities to contribute to open source and solve real-world scale challenges.

## Sources
1. [zilliz.com/careers](https://zilliz.com/careers) – Benefits, hybrid work model, company mission
2. [zilliz.com/about](https://zilliz.com/about) – Founding story, leadership, locations, investment, enterprise users
3. [zilliz.com](https://zilliz.com/) – Product details (Vector Lakebase, features, cost savings, scale)
4. [cr.linkedin.com/company/zilliz](https://cr.linkedin.com/company/zilliz) – Employee count, revenue, funding rounds, job postings, demographics
5. [theconsensus.dev/company/zilliz.html](https://theconsensus.dev/company/zilliz.html) – Funding history, job openings

## Other roles at Zilliz

- [Senior Recruiter, GTM](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-recruiter-gtm-zilliz-redwood-city-3dbaw85s6h7t) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Recruiter, Technical](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-recruiter-technical-zilliz-redwood-city-r3015tzfhrvh) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior HR Manager, North America & Europe](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-hr-manager-north-america-europe-zilliz-redwood-city-g3s4fq3wqjat) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer, Vector Index Research](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-vector-index-research-zilliz-redwood-city-4v3hvtr0jp3f) — Redwood City, CA
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Texas](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-texas-zilliz-austin-rexebkn8d37m) — Austin, TX
- [Enterprise Account Executive - South Korea](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-south-korea-zilliz-seoul-d99g77v0qhv9) — Seoul, South Korea
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Japan](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-japan-zilliz-tokyo-qbdvqknpzq1c) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Enterprise Account Executive - New York](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-new-york-zilliz-new-york-bcbdq3f8970x) — New York, NY
- [Enterprise Account Executive - Seattle](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-seattle-zilliz-seattle-2bz0g3gtmzjf) — Seattle, WA
- [Senior Software Engineer, Database Systems](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-database-systems-zilliz-redwood-city-apd7b6eqazwm) — Redwood City, CA