---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Reliability at Zilliz'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cloud-reliability-zilliz-redwood-city-c9k4a0ya4phg'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-07'
---

# Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Reliability at Zilliz

- **Company:** Zilliz
- **Location:** Redwood City, CA
- **Compensation:** $175k–$225k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2025-05-15
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-07
- **Apply:** https://jobs.lever.co/zilliz/7f796a0b-c1a5-4011-9e28-1cf9384e4c49

## 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, and far higher expectations for reliability. You'll join a small, fast-moving Cloud Platform team that operates large-scale, multi-cloud, distributed database systems in production. This is a high-ownership role for engineers who want to move fast, build automation instead of toil, and take real responsibility for production stability.

What you will do:

- Own the reliability, availability, and production stability of Zilliz Cloud as we scale through the next stage of growth
- Debug complex production issues across Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, networking, storage, and distributed database systems
- Build automation and diagnostic tooling; log analysis, alert correlation, incident investigation, runbook automation, and remediation workflows so problems get solved once, not repeatedly
- Turn recurring incidents into reusable tools, automation, documentation, and product improvements
- Improve observability across latency, availability, throughput, and resource efficiency
- Partner with database and infrastructure engineers to make Zilliz Cloud more reliable, scalable, and automated

What we are looking for:

- 3+ years building or operating production cloud systems, infrastructure platforms, database systems, or large-scale online services
- 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 (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Solid understanding of distributed systems; availability, scalability, performance, failure recovery, and operational tradeoffs
- Experience with distributed databases, storage systems, search systems, or large-scale online systems is a strong plus
- Experience operating highly multi-tenant systems or large infrastructure fleets; thousands of nodes, clusters, tenants, or customer deployments is especially valuable
- Familiarity with modern cloud operations tooling such as Terraform, Helm, Argo CD, Prometheus, Grafana, and CI/CD systems
- Strong bias for action, and the drive to thrive in a fast-paced, rapidly scaling environment

How we operate:

- High ownership: You own production reliability end-to-end. The whole system, not a slice of it. High autonomy, high trust, minimal process.
- Fast and focused: We ship often and keep a high bar. This team suits engineers who want velocity and a steep growth curve over red tape.
- Globally distributed: We work closely with our core engineering teams across APAC. Occasional early morning or evening syncs in exchange for an on-call setup designed around timezone coverage, not overnight pages.

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
- [Founding Field Engineer, Japan](https://feeny.ai/job/founding-field-engineer-japan-zilliz-tokyo-7zgf5mgkve3e) — Tokyo, Japan
- [Senior Software Engineer, Vector Index Research](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-vector-index-research-zilliz-redwood-city-4v3hvtr0jp3f) — Redwood City, CA
- [Senior Software Engineer, Cloud Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-cloud-platform-zilliz-redwood-city-f8sagdsxspja) — 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