Are you an Apache Cassandra committer eager to make a substantial impact in both technical and community realms? This role offers the chance to connect upstream work—such as committer authority, CEP-level design, and release stewardship—directly to production-scale results in one of the world's largest enterprise Cassandra deployments.

About the Company

NetApp Instaclustr operates one of the industry's largest managed Cassandra services, serving a diverse range of enterprise clients across financial services, retail, and technology sectors. Our engineering team is actively engaged with Cassandra 6.0, managing releases across core and ecosystem subprojects while driving upstream contributions that meet production-scale operator needs.

The Role

As our second Apache Cassandra core committer, you will work on upstream initiatives and customer impact, enjoying meaningful autonomy and strong peer collaboration. This globally distributed team may require up to 10% travel.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end upstream initiatives in Apache Cassandra, covering CEP authoring, design consensus, implementation, review, and release in areas like storage/compaction, indexing, distributed repair, and observability.
• Provide binding committer reviews on upstream patches and community contributions, ensuring high-quality work through the Apache Cassandra review process.
• Co-manage Apache Cassandra core release management as part of the rotating committer pool and contribute to NetApp-led ecosystem releases when possible.
• Translate enterprise customer needs into credible upstream proposals and designs, advising product and field teams on complex upstream trade-offs.
• Shape community direction through active participation on mailing lists, Apache Jira, GitHub, and forums, influencing project decisions on architecture and roadmap.
• Mentor engineers towards committer status and enhance overall contribution quality through rigorous review practices and clear guidance.
• Improve upstream infrastructure, including CI reliability and release automation, to strengthen NetApp's reputation as a project steward.

Requirements

• Minimum of 12 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Current Apache Cassandra committer status with a verifiable upstream track record in patches, reviews, and community standing.
• Expert Java engineering skills in performance-sensitive, concurrent, and production-grade distributed systems.
• Deep mastery of Apache Cassandra internals in domains such as storage, indexing, distributed consensus, or release management.
• Proven ability to lead technical work through Apache's governance model, including CEP authoring and design consensus.
• Strong written communication skills for global technical collaboration.
• Proven senior-level technical judgment and the ability to resolve blockers independently.

Nice to Have

• PMC membership in Apache Cassandra or a related subproject.
• Experience in Cassandra 6.0 feature areas like Accord and Transactional Cluster Metadata.
• History of mentoring contributors toward reviewer or committer status in open governance projects.
• Familiarity with Cassandra ecosystem subprojects like Sidecar or Analytics.

Education

Typically requires a minimum of 12 years of related experience for IC roles and a minimum of 8 years for Manager and Executive roles.