Principal Data Storage Architect

SciTec; Boulder (CO); On-site; USD 164,000 - 218,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) match

Health insurance

Paid parental leave

Flexible hours

Job summary

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead storage strategy and guidance for data persistence, retrieval, and processing across mission-critical workloads. You will guide how teams select, design, implement, benchmark, and operate storage solutions with hands-on technical work and mentorship.

The ideal candidate blends production-grade storage expertise, workload benchmarking, and strong communication to drive practical adoptable standards.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physical Sciences, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional experience designing, implementing, and troubleshooting production software systems, including significant experience with data storage systems.
• Deep expertise with relational databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL), including schema design, query and index optimization, and transactional behavior.
• Production experience with search/document stores (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, MongoDB), caches (Redis, Memcached), or object storage (AWS S3, Garage, or similar).
• Strong understanding of distributed storage concepts, including replication, partitioning, consistency models, and recovery.
• Demonstrated ability to build prototypes, conduct benchmarks, analyze results, and turn findings into actionable recommendations.
• Experience evaluating technical alternatives and clearly articulating tradeoffs among latency, throughput, scalability, availability, consistency, cost, and operational complexity.
• Proficiency in at least one backend language such as Python, Go, Java, C++, or TypeScript/Node.js.
• Comfortable working in Linux development environments.
• Strong technical writing, mentoring, and cross-team communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering practices through technical credibility.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Assess current storage technologies, data access patterns, recurring problems, and capability gaps across engineering teams.
• Define evaluation criteria and use benchmarks against representative workloads to select and maintain a Core Collection of recommended storage technologies, patterns, and practices.
• Document recommended technologies, valid alternatives, and exceptional cases through decision guides, reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), and tuning and troubleshooting guides.
• Build and maintain validated reference implementations, starter templates, and reusable configurations for common storage use cases.
• Guide data modeling, schema design, indexing, query planning, and performance optimization.
• Advise on transactional behavior, isolation, consistency, durability, and concurrency.
• Establish practices for caching strategies, eviction policies, cache invalidation, and hot-key management.
• Guide search and document indexing, ingestion patterns, and index lifecycle management.
• Guide object storage organization, lifecycle policies, and access patterns.
• Lead replication, partitioning, capacity planning, backup and recovery, and failure analysis efforts.
• Partner with engineers through pair programming, design and code reviews, troubleshooting, and focused workshops to support consistent adoption of recommended practices.
• Collaborate with Workload Communications and Deployment Environments domain leads on cross-domain problems such as connection pooling, consumer lag, and end-to-end throughput and latency.
• Periodically reassess and update recommendations and documentation as technologies, workloads, and engineering needs change.
• Track adoption and engineering outcomes against established baselines and report results to engineering leadership.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Skills

Python

Go

Java

C++

TypeScript/Node.js

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Elasticsearch

OpenSearch

MongoDB

Redis

Memcached

AWS S3

Job description

SciTec, a Firefly Aerospace company, seeks a Principal Software Engineer to lead storage strategy and guidance for data persistence, retrieval, and processing across mission-critical workloads. You will guide how teams select, design, implement, benchmark, and operate storage solutions with hands-on technical work and mentorship.

The ideal candidate blends production-grade storage expertise, workload benchmarking, and strong communication to drive practical adoptable standards.