Senior Data Path Engineer for High-Performance Systems

DDN; Sacramento (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

DDN is seeking a Sr Staff Engineer – Data Path to design, develop, and optimize performance-critical data path components within a distributed storage and data services platform. This senior individual contributor will influence architectures while staying hands-on in C/C++.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, drive performance, scalability, and reliability, and mentor engineers while upholding best practices for observability and testing.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in a technical field.
• 12+ years of experience in systems software, distributed systems, or infrastructure engineering.
• Proven experience designing and implementing performance-critical software components.
• Proficiency in C/C++ or similar systems programming languages.
• Solid understanding of OS fundamentals, concurrency, memory management, and networking concepts.
• Ability to work independently on complex problems and influence system-level outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and optimize core data path components in large-scale, distributed systems.
• Contribute to system architecture decisions affecting performance, throughput, latency, and resource utilization.
• Develop high-quality, maintainable code for performance-critical paths (C/C++).
• Analyze and optimize data movement across CPU, memory, storage, and network layers.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and drive solutions via profiling, benchmarking, and tuning.
• Lead design reviews and mentor engineers on systems design and performance engineering.

Skills

Systems design

Performance engineering

Leadership

Independent work

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

Tools

C/C++

Job description

DDN is seeking a Sr Staff Engineer – Data Path to design, develop, and optimize performance-critical data path components within a distributed storage and data services platform. This senior individual contributor will influence architectures while staying hands-on in C/C++.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, drive performance, scalability, and reliability, and mentor engineers while upholding best practices for observability and testing.