Senior Member of Technical Staff

Description

The company builds a software-defined cloud data platform whose core is a distributed storage operating system written in C and Rust, holding exabytes across datacenters, edge sites, and native cloud.

Customers range from hospital medical imaging archives to animation render farms, where 99% correct is not enough.

You would work on the distributed storage engine and the services customers use to store, manage, and protect their data.

The system includes a fault-tolerant block layer that erasure-codes and spreads data beneath the file system, and a transactional file system whose aggregates update as data changes, so queries across billions of files return in real time. The same machinery drives quotas, capacity trends, snapshot policy, multiple access protocols, replication, and backup, all in userspace.

This is a distributed operating system problem covering scheduling, memory hierarchy, protection, and concurrency. Coding agents may write code, but engineers own every design decision and nothing ships unless it is right.

The team is small, so you work daily with a few strong engineers, including the people who interview you. Disagreement is normal, you own designs from idea to release, and your work reaches the product. Architecture, protocols, and patents are public, so you can study them before you apply.

Recent projects include federating namespace subtrees across regions and clouds, keeping search indexes consistent while the namespace changes, and moving data to GPU clusters before they request it.

The platform serves HPC, AI, media rendering, genomics, medical imaging, and video surveillance workloads, with more than 1,100 customers and exabytes under management. It unifies file and object storage across data centers, edge, and public clouds.

Responsibilities

• Design and build across the file system and the block layer beneath it, in C and Rust.
• Work with a team of very capable people on hard problems.
• Take designs, including your own, from rough idea to shipped code.
• Use coding agents heavily, pushing them to deliver close to full value.
• Debug across protocol, file system, cache, network, and object store.
• Find correctness bugs that appear only under real-world conditions.
• Improve everything you touch.
• Prototype the next thing worth building and present it to the team.

Requirements

• At least 6+ years building systems software, such as a file system, kernel, database engine, compiler, driver, or distributed data path.
• You choose C, C++, or Rust for your work.
• You use AI coding tools daily and can name a complex project you could not have built without them. You know where those tools fail, and you hand off execution while keeping the judgement.
• You have worked inside a real distributed system and understand concurrency, consistency, failure, and recovery from experience.
• You dig into root causes and are comfortable working in code you did not write.
• Bonus: experience with distributed file systems, NFS, SMB, or S3.
• Bonus: experience with platforms such as NetApp, PowerScale, Isilon, VAST, WEKA, Ceph, or Lustre.
• Bonus: experience with indexing, query, or search internals.
• Bonus: a public open source contribution, write-up, or project you built.

Conditions

You must be authorized to work in the United States. No visa sponsorship or transfer is available.

The role is hybrid, based at the downtown Seattle headquarters, with a target of 3 days a week in the office.

The annual base pay range is USD $200,000 to $300,000.

The company values diverse points of view and considers diversity a driver of innovation.

Benefits

• Pre-IPO stock options.
• Flexible time off.
• Health, dental, and vision insurance.
• A 401(k) plan.
• An internet stipend.
• An employee assistance program.
• Onsite parking or a public transit subsidy.