Senior Software Engineer-Objective Storage

DataDirect Networks (DDN.com) is a world leader in massively scalable storage. We are the leading provider of data storage and processing solutions and professional services that enable content-rich and high-growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver results from their information. Our customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production organizations and security & intelligence organizations.

Job Description

We are seeking a Senior 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.

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++ 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.

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.

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

DDN has a very strong orientation towards these 4 characteristics and any successful employee will demonstrate these capabilities: 

Self-Starter - Takes independent action to identify and solve problems. Seeks out relevant information needed to make decisions. Gets involved with new initiatives. 

Success/Achievement Orientation - Delivers quality results consistently. Targets, achieves (or exceeds) measurable results. Sets challenging goals, focuses on critical priorities, and is accountable. 

Problem Solving - Recognizes problems and responds with a systematic assessment that identifies and addresses cause of issue. Practical, realistic, and resourceful. 

Innovative - Builds and improves key business processes that enhance the effectiveness of DDN. Generates new ideas, challenges the status quo, and solves problems creatively.

DataDirect Networks, Inc. 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.