Principal Architect, Core Platform
Company: Teradata
Location: San Diego
Posted on: January 19, 2026
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Job Description:
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 Youll 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 Youll 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.
Keywords: Teradata, Fountain Valley , Principal Architect, Core Platform, IT / Software / Systems , San Diego, California
