Senior Cloudera Hadoop Administrator - Remote

US Shift - 7:30 PM - 4:30 AM

Senior Cloudera Hadoop Administrator: Big Data Platform Operations (On-Prem)

About the Role

Join our Data Platform Infrastructure team as a Senior Hadoop Administrator to operate Cloudera (CDH/CDP 7.x) clusters at scale in on-premises environments. In this role, you will take ownership of the health, scalability, and reliability of our Hadoop platform, while leading automation initiatives that reduce manual, error-prone operations across a large server fleet and multiple environments. You will partner with data engineering teams, application owners, and infrastructure and security teams, and mentor junior engineers to ensure the platform remains stable, secure, and highly performant.

What You'll Do

-Own and lead the roadmap for Cloudera cluster operations: drive CDH-to-CDP migrations and CDP 7.x upgrades, oversee node lifecycle activities (adding, decommissioning, rebalancing, replacing), and sustain cluster health across environments at scale

-Lead troubleshooting for complex production and non-production incidents, using Cloudera Manager, service logs, metrics, and OS-level diagnostics to identify root cause across HDFS, YARN, Hive, Impala, Spark, HBase, Kafka, and related services

-Manage a large fleet of on-prem servers and environments (dev, test, prod, DR), ensuring consistent configuration, patching, and capacity across clusters

-Develop and execute an automation strategy for operational workflows: replace manual runbooks with scripts and tools for upgrades, patching, remediation, scaling, and routine maintenance

-Diagnose and resolve complex platform blockers, including job failures, resource contention (YARN queues, memory, I/O), HDFS imbalance and small-file challenges, and misconfigurations

-Own platform security and governance, including Kerberos, LDAP/AD integration, TLS, Apache Ranger, Atlas, and data access controls

-Establish and enhance the observability approach, including monitoring, logging, and alerting (Cloudera Manager, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar) to minimize time-to-detect and time-to-resolve

-Own capacity planning, performance tuning, backup, and disaster recovery, including HDFS snapshots, BDR/replication, and metadata backups

-Set standards for issue tracking and triage: create detailed bug reports and RCAs, coordinate with Cloudera Support during escalations, and improve the team’s reporting practices

-Collaborate with data engineering, application, network, and security teams to align on requirements, maintenance windows, and upgrade schedules

-Lead on-call rotations and incident response, own post-incident reviews, and drive continuous improvement across the platform

-Mentor and upskill junior and mid-level engineers through technical guidance and design reviews

What We're Looking For

Required

-7-9 years of experience in Hadoop administration, big data platform engineering, or infrastructure operations

­­­-Deep, hands-on experience administering Cloudera CDH and CDP 7.x in on-prem environments, including upgrades, migrations, and cluster expansion

-Proven experience managing large server fleets and multiple environments (hundreds of nodes preferred)

-Strong knowledge of the Hadoop ecosystem: HDFS, YARN, Hive, Impala, Spark, HBase, Kafka, ZooKeeper, Oozie

-Strong Linux administration skills (RHEL/CentOS), including performance tuning, networking, storage, and kernel/OS-level troubleshooting

-Strong scripting skills (Python, Bash, or similar) with a track record of building automation used by multiple teams

-Expert-level debugging of distributed systems, from symptom to root cause across interdependent services

-Hands-on experience with Kerberos, LDAP/AD, TLS/SSL, and Hadoop security tooling (Ranger, Sentry/Knox)

-Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to produce clear status updates, RCAs, and technical documentation

-Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and leading technical initiatives

Preferred

-Experience with CDH-to-CDP migration and CDP Private Cloud Base

-Configuration management and automation tools (Ansible, Puppet, Chef) for fleet-wide consistency

-Experience with Cloudera Manager APIs and automation via REST/CLI

-Monitoring and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Nagios, Splunk, ELK)

-Familiarity with CI/CD tooling (Jenkins, GitHub Actions) and Git-based workflows

-Experience with Nuance-related environments or workloads

-Experience with HDFS and Hive data replication, backup, and DR design

-Exposure to containerized or hybrid workloads (Kubernetes, CDP Private Cloud Data Services)

-Experience contributing to architectural decisions for data platforms