Behavioral Designer Jobs in Madison, WI (NOW HIRING)

Join a small advanced research team within the Office of the Chief Technology Officer focused on shaping the next generation of Teradata's platform.

This role centers on the foundational layer of the system — how compute actually runs. You'll work close to the hardware and operating system boundary, shaping how resources are provisioned, configured, and optimized across environments spanning bare metal, virtualized systems, containerized platforms, and major cloud providers.

Rather than operating within a fixed platform, you will help define how systems behave at runtime. The environments you design are intended to support highly scalable, performance-sensitive workloads, where efficiency, predictability, and resource utilization matter.

This is work where resource behavior is not abstract — how scheduling, memory, and I/O interact directly determines whether the system performs or degrades.

You'll work with significant ownership in a small team, using AI-assisted development tools to explore, build, and refine systems with the leverage of a much larger organization — while maintaining direct accountability for how those systems perform under real conditions.

• Own and evolve how compute infrastructure is provisioned and operates across heterogeneous environments, including bare metal, VMs, containers, and cloud platforms.
• Define and tune system-level behavior across CPU, memory, storage, and network, including how workloads are scheduled and resources are utilized.
• Design repeatable, auditable provisioning and deployment workflows using infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, or similar).
• Shape runtime characteristics such as startup behavior, workload placement, and resource efficiency as systems scale.
• Identify and resolve bottlenecks across I/O throughput, network behavior, and provisioning performance.
• Use AI-assisted tools to explore and accelerate implementation, refining outputs into production-ready infrastructure.
• Collaborate with control plane engineering to establish a clear and stable foundation for higher-level services.

You will work within a small, senior Advanced Research Team inside Teradata's Office of the CTO — a structure that gives your work direct visibility and impact without layers of process. You will collaborate with:

• Control plane engineers who depend on a stable, well-defined infrastructure foundation to build higher-level services on top of your work.
• Systems researchers and senior architects who bring deep domain expertise across distributed systems, query engines, and platform design.
• Peers who operate with ownership and accountability — a small team where the quality of every individual's contribution is visible and consequential.

• Experience working at the systems or infrastructure layer, including OS behavior, runtime environments, or low-level system interactions.
• Experience operating Kubernetes (or similar systems), including familiarity with scheduling behavior, node-level characteristics, and cluster lifecycle concerns.
• Familiarity with containerization, virtualization, and infrastructure provisioning across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Experience designing systems intended to run across multiple environments, with portability and consistency in mind.
• Understanding of distributed system behavior, particularly how resource constraints affect performance and scalability.
• Experience with observability, profiling, or performance analysis at the system level.
• Comfort working in environments where system design and direction are actively evolving.

Core requirements:

• Hands‑on ownership mindset — you take responsibility for how systems behave in production, not just how they're designed on paper.
• AI‑assisted development fluency — this team uses AI tools as a core part of how work gets done; you're comfortable directing, evaluating, and refining AI-generated implementations.
• Clear communication across disciplines — you can explain infrastructure behavior and design tradeoffs to engineers working at higher levels of the stack.

Nice to have:

• Exposure to query engines, columnar databases, or analytical data platforms (e.g., Presto, Trino, Spark, DataFusion).
• Background in big data infrastructure or data pipelines — familiarity with the scale and volume of data these systems process.
• Experience with eBPF, kernel performance tuning, or NUMA‑aware hardware configuration.
• Contributions to open‑source infrastructure tooling.

This is a rare opportunity to do foundational infrastructure work that matters — where how you design the compute layer directly shapes what's possible for the platform above it. You'll have real ownership, work alongside senior engineers who've solved these problems at scale before, and use AI tooling as a genuine force multiplier.

We prioritize a people‑first culture because we know our people are at the very heart of our success. We embrace a flexible work model because we trust our people to make decisions about how, when, and where they work. We focus on well‑being because we care about our people and their ability to thrive both personally and professionally. We are an anti‑racist company because our dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is more than a statement — it is a deep commitment to doing the work to foster an equitable environment that celebrates people for all of who they are.

Teradata is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, color, ancestry, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related conditions), national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, medical condition, genetic information, gender identity or expression, military and veteran status, or any other legally protected status. We welcome and encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply and join our team, bringing their unique perspectives and experiences to help us innovate and grow. If you require accommodations during the interview process, please let your recruiter know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

Pay Rate: 132900.0000 - 166100.0000 - 199300.0000 Annually

Starting pay for the successful applicant will depend on geographic location, internal equity, job‑related knowledge, skills, and candidate experience. Sales roles will be eligible for commission payments tied to quota achievement. All other permanent roles will be eligible for one of our annual incentive plans, which are based on company financial attainment and individual performance. Employees in this position are eligible to participate in the Company’s benefits programs, which generally include health care, life and disability insurance, retirement savings, and time‑off programs. Benefit details vary by country and plan, including eligibility and available options, and will be shared during the hiring process. Additional information is available here: https://www.teradata.com/About-Us/Careers/Benefits