Staff Software Engineer – Object Storage

Overview

This is an incredible opportunity to be part of a company that has been at the forefront of AI and high-performance data storage innovation for over two decades. DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a global market leader renowned for powering many of the world's most demanding AI data centers, in industries ranging from life sciences and healthcare to financial services, autonomous cars, Government, academia, research and manufacturing.

"DDN's A3I solutions are transforming the landscape of AI infrastructure." – IDC

“The real differentiator is DDN. I never hesitate to recommend DDN. DDN is the de facto name for AI Storage in high performance environments” - Marc Hamilton, VP, Solutions Architecture & Engineering | NVIDIA

DDN is the global leader in AI and multi-cloud data management at scale. Our cutting-edge data intelligence platform is designed to accelerate AI workloads, enabling organizations to extract maximum value from their data. With a proven track record of performance, reliability, and scalability, DDN empowers businesses to tackle the most challenging AI and data-intensive workloads with confidence.

Our success is driven by our unwavering commitment to innovation, customer-centricity, and a team of passionate professionals who bring their expertise and dedication to every project. This is a chance to make a significant impact at a company that is shaping the future of AI and data management.

Our commitment to innovation, customer success, and market leadership makes this an exciting and rewarding role for a driven professional looking to make a lasting impact in the world of AI and data storage.

Job Description

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer who is deeply passionate about distributed storage systems, with a particular focus on object storage at scale. At DDN, we’re building the next generation of object storage capabilities to meet the demands of AI, analytics, and hyperscale workloads.

In this role, you will define the technical roadmap, mentor engineers, and lead the architecture and implementation of features that push the boundaries of performance, availability, scalability, and durability in distributed object storage systems.

This is a technical leadership role at the core of one of our most strategic platform layers. You’ll work across functional boundaries — collaborating with platform, metadata, and performance teams — to deliver robust, AI-ready storage infrastructure for the most demanding workloads on Earth.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and own the long-term technical roadmap for DDN’s next-gen object storage platform.
• Design and implement core object storage subsystems, including data placement strategies, metadata indexing, erasure coding, and consistency models.
• Lead architectural reviews, guide design discussions, and mentor senior engineers across multiple teams.

Performance, Availability, & Concurrency Engineering

• Solve complex challenges related to massive data concurrency, geo-replication, data durability, and read/write performance.
• Optimize data paths, metadata lookups, and caching strategies to support real-time, high-throughput AI and analytics pipelines.
• Contribute to intelligent tiering, multi-site consistency models, and policy-driven object lifecycle management.

Scalability & Infrastructure Evolution

• Collaborate with distributed systems and networking teams to ensure end-to-end reliability, from disk to client.
• Develop features that support billions of objects, multi-petabyte deployments, and sub-second latency guarantees.
• Implement observability hooks and metrics that feed into telemetry and AI-driven tuning systems.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product Management, QA, and Field Engineering to prioritize work, clarify customer requirements, and ensure production readiness.
• Work with AI/ML platform teams to align storage performance with RAG pipelines, model training, and autonomous workflows.
• Drive a culture of excellence, code quality, and operational rigor across the object storage organization.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in distributed systems or storage engineering, with deep hands-on experience in object storage (e.g., S3, Ceph, MinIO, Scality).
• Expertise in C/C++, Rust, or Go with a strong understanding of performance profiling, memory management, and multi-threading.
• Solid understanding of storage constructs like erasure coding, consistency protocols, tiering, replication, and access control.
• Proven track record of designing scalable systems with high availability and low latency under real-world workloads.
• Experience mentoring engineers, leading complex codebases, and aligning technical work to product strategy.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on high-performance storage for AI/ML data pipelines or HPC environments.
• Familiarity with cloud-native storage APIs, S3 compatibility layers, and Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Understanding of file-to-object transition patterns and hybrid storage architectures.
• Contributions to open-source storage frameworks or prior experience in highly scalable storage startups.

This position requires participation in an on-call rotation to provide after-hours support as needed.

Success Metrics – First 30 Days

Technical Onboarding

• Ramp up on DDN’s storage architecture, platform roadmap, and codebase.
• Shadow design discussions and review at least 3 active development tracks.
• Deliver an initial analysis of performance bottlenecks or architectural tradeoffs for current object storage layer.

Strategic Contribution

• Propose a refined 6-month roadmap for key architectural improvements or performance enhancements.
• Identify 2–3 technical debt areas and draft plans for cleanup, optimization, or refactor.

Collaboration & Influence

• Establish strong working relationships with other Staff+ engineers, Product Managers, and Field stakeholders.
• Begin mentoring 1–2 engineers and contributing to code reviews and design sessions.

Success Metrics – Beyond 30 Days

• High impact design or implementation contributions adopted into core object storage releases.
• Improvement in performance, latency, or scalability benchmarks across representative customer workloads.
• Measurable reduction in support escalations related to object storage subsystem.
• Recognized as a go-to expert for object storage design and decision-making across the company.

Join us to shape the backbone of intelligent infrastructure — where object storage isn’t just a backend layer, but the core enabler of global AI workloads, data pipelines, and mission-critical insight engines.

Apply now to build the next era of distributed storage with us

DDN

Join our dynamic and driven team, where engineering excellence is at the heart of everything we do. We seek individuals who love to challenge themselves and are fueled by curiosity. Here, you'll have the opportunity to work across various areas of the company, thanks to our flat organizational structure that encourages hands-on involvement and direct contributions to our mission. Leadership is earned by those who take initiative and consistently deliver outstanding results, both in their work ethic and deliverables, making strong prioritization skills essential. Additionally, we value strong communication skills in all our engineers and researchers, as they are crucial for the success of our teams and the company as a whole.

Interview Process: After submitting your application, one of our recruiters will review your resume. If your application passes this stage, you will be invited to a 30-minute interview during which a member of our team will ask some basic questions. If you clear the interview, you will enter the main process, which can consist of up to four interviews in total:

• Coding assessment: Often in a language of your choice.
• Systems design: Translate high-level requirements into a scalable, fault-tolerant service (depending on role).
• Real-time problem-solving: Demonstrate practical skills in a live problem-solving session.
• Meet and greet with the wider team.
• Our goal is to finish the main process in 2-3 weeks at most.

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, transgender, sex stereotyping, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, protected Veteran Status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.