About the role
Role Overview
We are seeking a 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.