Cluster & Systems Capacity Engineer

Backblaze; United States; Remote; USD 123,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Healthcare coverage

401K plan

RSU grants

Employee stock purchase plan

MacBook Pro

Flexible vacation

Parental leave

Learning program

Job summary

Backblaze in the United States seeks a Capacity Planning Engineer to drive forecasting, hardware deployment, and cost-optimized scaling of our global storage platform. You will partner with infrastructure, production, and network teams to ensure service availability and performance as demand grows.

You will develop predictive models, forecasting pipelines, and headroom policies, shaping hardware bills of materials and capital budgeting while maintaining focus on reliability and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, Math, Data Science, IS, Statistics, or related field.
• 3–6+ years in site reliability, capacity planning, or cloud infra roles.
• Experience with large-scale distributed storage systems.
• Proficiency with data tools Snowflake, Metabase, Grafana, Python, SQL, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, and Excel/Sheets.

Responsibilities

• Forecast capacity, hardware deployment across storage, compute, and network.
• Build predictive models from utilization, growth trends, and roadmaps.
• Collaborate with infra, prod, and network teams on capacity scaling.
• Develop forecasting pipelines, dashboards, and tooling for visibility.
• Monitor cluster utilization and adjust plans to maintain headroom.
• Lead hardware procurement and provisioning with cross-functional teams.

Skills

Data analysis

Analytical thinking

Communication

Documentation

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS, Engineering, Math, Data Science, IS, Statistics, or related field

Tools

Snowflake

Metabase

Grafana

Python

SQL

Prometheus

Victoria Metrics

Excel or Google Sheets

Job description

Role overview

This role sits within a cloud operations organization that runs a large-scale global cloud storage platform serving hundreds of thousands of customers. The engineer drives planning, deployment, and optimization of storage clusters, compute, and network infrastructure to ensure the platform scales reliably, cost-efficiently, and ahead of demand. It is a high-impact position directly contributing to service availability, durability, performance, margin optimization, and long-term platform scalability.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain short, medium, and long-term capacity demand and hardware deployment forecasts across storage, compute, and network domains
• Build predictive models that translate business demand signals into infrastructure requirements using historical utilization, growth trends, product plans, and hardware lifecycle roadmaps
• Partner with infrastructure, production, and network engineering teams to align capacity plans with system design and scaling initiatives
• Develop and automate forecasting pipelines, simulation calculators, capacity dashboards, and related tooling to improve data quality and provide clear visibility into platform usage and cluster health
• Monitor and analyze cluster and system-level utilization and performance across CPU, memory, IOPS, and network resources
• Adjust deployment plans and recommended configurations in real time to maintain adequate headroom and system stability
• Partner with service and platform owners to develop headroom policies, optimize hardware bills of materials, leverage virtualized orchestration, and reduce product cost
• Work with operations and finance peers to align capacity plans with capital budgets, cost targets, and financial outcomes
• Lead evaluation, procurement, and provisioning of new or additional hardware in partnership with systems and network engineering, SRE, NOC, and data center operations teams

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Data Science, Information Systems, Statistics, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience
• Three to six or more years of experience in site reliability engineering, infrastructure capacity planning, systems or infrastructure engineering, production engineering, data center operations, or a similar cloud operations role
• Familiarity with cloud storage infrastructure, particularly highly available, large-scale distributed systems that support large data volumes with high throughput and complex performance requirements
• Background in capacity modeling, performance analysis, scenario modeling, and infrastructure cost optimization, with ability to quantify ideas within financial frameworks
• Proficiency with database and data analysis tools such as Snowflake, Metabase, Grafana, Python, SQL, Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, and Excel or Google Sheets
• Strong data analysis, analytical, and logical reasoning abilities
• Excellent communication and documentation skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts accurately and concisely
• Desire to work on a highly autonomous team that cares deeply about quality, cost, and the customer experience

Benefits and work setup

• Expected base salary range of $123,000 to $175,000, determined by factors including location, skills, experience, and relevant credentials
• Healthcare coverage for family, including dental and vision
• Competitive compensation plus a 401K plan
• RSU grants for full-time employees and an employee stock purchase plan
• Flexible vacation policy with maternity and paternity leave
• MacBook Pro provided for work plus a generous workstation personalization stipend
• Childcare bonus, fertility treatment and support benefits, commuter benefits, and a learning and development program
• Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance