Senior Staff Storage Engineer
DDN · Santa Clara
Role Overview
We are seeking a Senior Staff Storage Backend Engineer to design and optimize the next generation of high-performance distributed storage systems. This role focuses on building the core I/O path, improving scalability, reliability, and software quality across large-scale storage clusters.
The ideal candidate has deep expertise in C/C++, distributed systems, storage architecture, and performance optimization, with a proven track record of building highly available, low-latency infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
Storage Architecture & Development
Design, develop, and optimize high-performance storage I/O paths for extreme throughput, low latency, and high concurrency.
Build and improve distributed storage components, including erasure coding, data protection, recovery, and data layout algorithms.
Develop scalable concurrency models, locking mechanisms, and fault-tolerant designs.
Performance & Scalability
Analyze and optimize storage performance across CPU, memory, caching, scheduling, and data movement paths.
Drive profiling, benchmarking, and performance tuning across multi-node, multi-device environments.
Design asynchronous, event-driven architectures supporting AI workloads, high-speed data pipelines, and real-time analytics.
Technical Leadership
Serve as a technical leader for the IO Path team, driving architecture decisions, design reviews, code reviews, and complex debugging efforts.
Partner with engineering leadership to define technical strategy, evaluate new technologies, and influence the product roadmap.
Mentor engineers and promote engineering excellence through strong engineering practices and rigorous technical reviews.
Quality & Cross-Functional Collaboration
Collaborate with QE, storage, networking, performance, field, and support teams to deliver reliable enterprise-class software.
Partner with QE to identify quality gaps, improve validation strategies, and ensure robust coverage of complex distributed storage scenarios.
Debug complex customer and system issues and translate learnings into product improvements.
Influence CI/CD pipelines, automation frameworks, and release processes to enable scalable and reliable software delivery.
Required Qualifications
15+ years of experience developing large-scale systems software using C/C++.
10+ years of hands-on experience designing and developing storage systems, distributed storage platforms, or high-performance I/O subsystems.
Deep understanding of storage architecture, I/O optimization, memory management, caching, scheduling, and data path design.
Experience with distributed storage concepts, including erasure coding, replication, recovery, and fault tolerance.
Hands-on experience with SPDK or similar high-performance user-space storage frameworks.
Strong knowledge of concurrency, synchronization, and distributed systems design.
Expertise in performance analysis, profiling, debugging, and system optimization.
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with high-performance computing (HPC), AI infrastructure, or large-scale storage platforms.
Experience with distributed file systems, object storage, or hybrid storage architectures.
Knowledge of NVMe-oF, RDMA, and high-speed networking technologies.
Experience building observability, monitoring, and self-healing infrastructure.
Familiarity with containerized workloads and cluster orchestration.
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