Senior Staff Storage Engineer
ddn
Santa Clara Colocation
Posted Aug 4, 2026
- Full-time
- Remote
- Department
Job description
**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.