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Staff Storage Engineer

DataDirect Networks

Santa Clara, CA · $200k–$240k a year · Posted August 4, 2026

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  • CI/CD
  • C#

About the job

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.