Principal Software Engineer - Storage

Academic Key; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days annual leave

Job summary

Radiant in the United Kingdom seeks a Principal Software Engineer - Storage to drive the technical direction of cloud storage services for demanding AI workloads. You will own architecture for object, block, and file storage, and integrate with compute, Kubernetes CSI, and security teams.

You will mentor engineers, raise the bar on design standards, and partner with customers to address highly technical storage challenges. Strong leadership and advanced storage expertise are essential.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage systems.
• Hands-on engineering in Go or similar languages.
• Proven ability to lead technical direction across multiple teams.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical vision and architecture for radiants storage services.
• Design and implement storage systems across object, block and file storage.
• Coordinate with product, SRE, networking, and security teams to meet workload requirements.
• Ensure performance, durability, availability, and consistency targets are met.

Skills

Go

Distributed storage

Kubernetes

S3 protocol

LB/Reliability design

Tools

WEKA

VAST

DDN

Lustre

Ceph

MinIO

Pure Storage

Job description

What You'll Do As a Principal Software Engineer - Storage, you will help set the technical direction for Radiant's cloud storage offering and lead the design and delivery of the storage services and data capabilities required to run demanding cloud and AI workloads at scale. You'll work across object, block, and file storage, data lifecycle, performance, resilience, APIs, and platform integrations. You'll partner closely with product, infrastructure, SRE, networking, and security teams, and with customers running the most demanding storage workloads. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role focused on building storage services that are high-performance, reliable, scalable, and easy to consume, through architecture, code, and the standards other teams build on. Key Responsibilities Set the technical vision and architecture for Radiant’s storage services, and lead their design and implementation. Design and build storage systems across object, block, and file, including the control plane, the data plane, and integration with existing Radiant services. Translate product and customer requirements into robust architectures, APIs, and technical designs, working closely with the Storage Product Manager. Own the performance, durability, availability, and consistency characteristics of the storage platform, and define the service levels it can credibly meet. Profile, benchmark, and tune throughput, latency, and IOPS for AI training, inference, and other data‑intensive workloads. Lead integration of storage with compute, Kubernetes (CSI), networking, IAM, observability, and developer tooling. Design for failure through replication, snapshots, data protection, failure recovery, and safe upgrades at scale. Drive operational excellence with SRE, including capacity planning, observability, incident response, and post‑incident improvements. Raise the engineering bar across the organisation through mentoring, design and code review, and technical standards. Your Profile Extensive experience building and operating large‑scale distributed storage systems or storage‑heavy cloud infrastructure. A track record of technical leadership at staff or principal level, including setting direction across multiple teams and delivering complex, high‑stakes systems. Strong hands‑on engineering skills in one or more systems languages such as Go or similar. Deep technical expertise across: Storage: object, block, and file storage, snapshots, replication, erasure coding, caching, tiering, data lifecycle Protocols & interfaces: S3, NFS, SMB, CSI, NVMe/NVMe‑oF, RDMA, POSIX semantics, storage APIs Infrastructure: Kubernetes, containers, high‑performance networking, GPU clusters, cloud platforms Reliability: durability, availability, consistency models, consensus, failure recovery, data integrity Observability & security: metrics, logging, tracing, IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, auditability Hands‑on experience with technologies such as WEKA, VAST, DDN, Lustre, Ceph, MinIO, Pure Storage, or similar. Understanding of AI and HPC storage patterns, such as large‑scale training data pipelines, checkpointing, and high‑throughput parallel file systems. Able to reason about trade‑offs between performance, durability, availability, cost, and operational complexity. Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear design documents and explaining complex trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical audiences. Comfortable working directly with customers on highly technical problems. What You Bring Storage domain expertise: Understand how storage architecture affects application and workload performance, down to the hardware. Engineering excellence: Write and review code that sets the standard for correctness, performance, and maintainability. Architectural judgement: Make sound long‑term decisions on systems where data loss is not an option. Technical leadership: Influence direction across teams without relying on authority, and grow the engineers around you. Systems thinking: Understand how storage interacts with compute, networking, and the rest of the cloud platform. Ownership: Drive storage capabilities from design through production, operation, and continuous improvement. Qualities we look for: Set the standard: Every single day, you spot opportunities to constructively shake things up Inspire the change: There's no blueprint for the future. You'll embrace challenges and change You're real and you're true to yourself: We cherish and celebrate diversity so you'll feel right at home whoever you are and whoever you're talking to, you treat everyone the same. Why should you join us? What sets us apart is our blend of modern technology, competitive benefits, and an open, welcoming work culture that enables our people to thrive. Here are just some of the great things you can expect from us: 25 days of annual leave A culture that emphasises results over hierarchy, process & ego: we place great emphasis on the quality, ingenuity and creati

Principal Software Engineer - Storage

Radiant United Kingdom

Abroad United Kingdom Full Time

What You’ll Do As a Principal Software Engineer - Storage, you will help set the technical direction for Radiant's cloud storage offering and lead the design and delivery of the storage services and data capabilities required to run demanding cloud and AI workloads at scale. You'll work across object, block, and file storage, data lifecycle, performance, resilience, APIs, and platform integrations. You'll partner closely with product, infrastructure, SRE, networking, and security teams, and with customers running the most demanding storage workloads. This is a hands‑on technical leadership role focused on building storage services that are high-performance, reliable, scalable, and easy to consume, through architecture, code, and the standards other teams build on. Key Responsibilities Set the technical vision and architecture for Radiant’s storage services, and lead their design and implementation. Design and build storage systems across object, block, and file, including the control plane, the data plane, and integration with existing Radiant services. Translate product and customer requirements into robust architectures, APIs, and technical designs, working closely with the Storage Product Manager. Own the performance, durability, availability, and consistency characteristics of the storage platform, and define the service levels it can credibly meet. Profile, benchmark, and tune throughput, latency, and IOPS for AI training, inference, and other data‑intensive workloads. Lead integration of storage with compute, Kubernetes (CSI), networking, IAM, observability, and developer tooling. Design for failure through replication, snapshots, data protection, failure recovery, and safe upgrades at scale. Drive operational excellence with SRE, including capacity planning, observability, incident response, and post‑incident improvements. Raise the engineering bar across the organisation through mentoring, design and code review, and technical standards. Your Profile Extensive experience building and operating large‑scale distributed storage systems or storage‑heavy cloud infrastructure. A track record of technical leadership at staff or principal level, including setting direction across multiple teams and delivering complex, high‑stakes systems. Strong hands‑on engineering skills in one or more systems languages such as Go or similar. Deep technical expertise across: Storage: object, block, and file storage, snapshots, replication, erasure coding, caching, tiering, data lifecycle Protocols & interfaces: S3, NFS, SMB, CSI, NVMe/NVMe‑oF, RDMA, POSIX semantics, storage APIs Infrastructure: Kubernetes, containers, high‑performance networking, GPU clusters, cloud platforms Reliability: durability, availability, consistency models, consensus, failure recovery, data integrity Observability & security: metrics, logging, tracing, IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, auditability Hands‑on experience with technologies such as WEKA, VAST, DDN, Lustre, Ceph, MinIO, Pure Storage, or similar. Understanding of AI and HPC storage patterns, such as large‑scale training data pipelines, checkpointing, and high‑throughput parallel file systems. Able to reason about trade‑offs between performance, durability, availability, cost, and operational complexity. Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear design documents and explaining complex trade‑offs to technical and non‑technical audiences. Comfortable working directly with customers on highly technical problems. What You Bring Storage domain expertise: Understand how storage architecture affects application and workload performance, down to the hardware. Engineering excellence: Write and review code that sets the standard for correctness, performance, and maintainability. Architectural judgement: Make sound long‑term decisions on systems where data loss is not an option. Technical leadership: Influence direction across teams without relying on authority, and grow the engineers around you. Systems thinking: Understand how storage interacts with compute, networking, and the rest of the cloud platform. Ownership: Drive storage capabilities from design through production, operation, and continuous improvement. Qualities we look for: Set the standard: Every single day, you spot opportunities to constructively shake things up Inspire the change: There's no blueprint for the future. You'll embrace challenges and change You're real and you're true to yourself: We cherish and celebrate diversity so you'll feel right at home whoever you are and whoever you're talking to, you treat everyone the same. Why should you join us? What sets us apart is our blend of modern technology, competitive benefits, and an open, welcoming work culture that enables our people to thrive. Here are just some of the great things you can expect from us: 25 days of annual leave A culture that emphasises results over hierarchy, process & ego: we place great emphasis on the quality, ingenuity and creati