Senior Staff Engineer

Department: Top Level - By Department

Location: Santa Clara Colocation, Remote - North Carolina

Compensation: $225K – $275K • Offers Equity • Offers Bonus

Employment Type: FullTime

Company

DDN has spent 25+ years building the infrastructure behind the worlds most demanding computing environments - powering 48 of the top 100 supercomputers. Backed by $300M from Blackstone at a $5B valuation and deep partnerships with NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Google Cloud, were moving faster than ever. The AI boom has created unprecedented demand for exactly the kind of high-performance storage DDN has spent decades perfecting.

The Role

This role sits right at the center of that momentum. Were building our next-generation storage platform - designed from the ground up to solve the problems our existing products havent fully cracked. You wont be maintaining someone elses architecture. Youll be defining it.

On paper this is a Staff Software Engineer role. In practice, youre the architect. Youll own the design of our cloud control plane - the web application layer, the cloud services, observability, supportability - the whole nervous system that sits above our on-prem storage. And when somethings genuinely hard and an engineer is stuck, youre the person who rolls up their sleeves and fixes it yourself.

You will:

• Define and drive the architecture of a cloud-hosted control plane, including containerization, microservices, and orchestration

• Participate in the implementation of scalable software defined storage components

• Drive design discussions, build prototypes and contribute to deliver high quality products

• Conduct code reviews and improve scalability, stability, reliability and performance of solutions.

• Collaborate with your teammates and integrate a group of passionate developers in an outcome-oriented environment.

• Work closely with program management in the successful delivery of product releases

• Contribute to and validate product documentation

• Effectively manage, engage and complete projects as they are assigned to the role

• Provide regular reports on project progress and activity updates

• Ability to travel as may be required from time to time (e.g. for team meetings, training)

Experience:

• 10+ years of software development experience across file systems, concurrency, distributed systems, or server architecture

• Strong hands-on experience with C/C++ on Linux/UNIX systems

• Direct experience with scale-out, high-availability storage solutions

• Comfort spanning both cloud-native architecture and on-premises infrastructure realities

• Deep storage or file-system knowledge (e.g. Lustre, GPFS) is valued but not mandatory - candidates with strong architectural range and hands-on ability, and some storage exposure, are equally encouraged to apply

This is an opportunity to shape a new product from its architectural foundation, within a company with genuine history, credibility, and current momentum.