Staff Software Engineer - Connectivity

Be Part of Building the Future Dremio is the unified lakehouse platform for self-service analytics and AI, serving hundreds of global enterprises, including Maersk, Amazon, Regeneron, NetApp, and S&P Global. Customers rely on Dremio for cloud, hybrid, and on-prem lakehouses to power their data mesh, data warehouse migration, data virtualization, and unified data access use cases. Based on open source technologies, including Apache Iceberg and Apache Arrow, Dremio provides an open lakehouse architecture enabling the fastest time to insight and platform flexibility at a fraction of the cost. Learn more at www.dremio.com. About the role Dremio's Connectivity team builds the high-performance connectivity solutions that help customers bring data to Dremio and connect Dremio to the broader data ecosystem. The team works across client drivers, protocols, connectors, interoperability, distributed systems, and the reliability and supportability of production data access. As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll independently own multiple medium-to-large features or service components within a Connectivity and Clients area. You'll define the approach for a substantial team-area scope, turn ambiguous goals into clear milestones, make sound feature and service-level design decisions, and drive work through reliable production delivery. You will bring deep expertise in at least one area, such as JDBC or ODBC drivers, Apache Arrow ADBC, Arrow Flight SQL, BI interoperability, source connectivity, or connectivity reliability, while contributing effectively across adjacent areas. You will also mentor engineers and influence partner teams through strong technical judgment and execution. What you'll be doing • Own substantial connectivity work: Lead multiple medium-to-large features or service components from problem definition through design, implementation, validation, release readiness, and operational handoff. • Turn ambiguity into an execution plan: Define reviewable milestones, acceptance measures, dependencies, estimates, and risks for complex customer, product, and engineering goals. • Design scalable, maintainable systems: Produce technical designs and architecture diagrams, explain trade-offs, and make feature and service-level decisions across drivers, protocols, client libraries, connectors, and distributed services. • Diagnose complex failures: Lead root-cause analysis across client/server, protocol, network, authentication, metadata, and distributed-system boundaries using logs, telemetry, profiles, benchmarks, and production evidence. • Build compatibility and reliability: Maintain API and protocol stability; create automated compatibility, interoperability, performance, scale, reliability, observability, and diagnostics coverage; and define practical migration paths for supported and legacy clients. • Collaborate and influence: Partner with Product, Query Execution, QA, Support, SRE, Documentation, and external technology partners to resolve dependencies and improve certification, customer experience, and supportability. • Raise the engineering bar: Participate actively in code and design reviews, mentor and coach engineers, improve team practices, and contribute to relevant upstream open-source projects when aligned with Dremio priorities. • Use AI-assisted development tools responsibly: Apply Dremio-approved AI tools to code comprehension, debugging, test generation, and documentation while protecting proprietary and customer data and validating results through review, testing, and sound engineering judgment. What we're looking for • Staff-level ownership: 8+ years of production software engineering experience, or equivalent depth demonstrated through sustained ownership of complex systems and multiple substantial team-a