Senior Member of Technical Staff

Madrona Venture Labs; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Health insurance

Dental & Vision insurance

401(k)

Internet stipend

Employee Assistance Program

Transit subsidy

Job summary

Qumulo seeks a Senior MTS to design and implement across the file system and its block layer in C and Rust, tackling hard distributed systems problems. You will collaborate with a bright team, take designs from concept to shipped code, and push the envelope on AI-assisted development while ensuring correctness and performance.

The role emphasizes debugging across protocol, file system, cache, network, and object store, with a focus on root-cause analysis and incremental improvements in a hybrid

Qualifications

• 6+ years building systems software (filesystem/kernel/db engine/driver/distributed data path).
• Proficient in C, C++, or Rust by choice.
• Experience with AI coding tools and understanding their limits.
• Experience in a real distributed system with concurrency, consistency, and recovery.

Responsibilities

• Design and build across the file system and block layer beneath it, in C and Rust.
• Collaborate with a team to solve hard problems.
• Take designs from rough thesis to shipped code.
• Leverage coding agents to accelerate development while maintaining judgement.
• Debug across protocol, file system, cache, network, and object store.
• Identify root causes and cover edge cases under real-world workloads.
• Leave every component better than you found it.
• Prototype the next thing worth building and bring it to the team.

Skills

C/C++/Rust

AI coding tools

Distributed systems

Concurrency & fault tolerance

Job description

Qumulo is a software-defined cloud data platform. Our core is a distributed storage operating system in C & Rust, holding exabytes in the datacenter, at the edge, and natively in the cloud. Qumulo serves everything from a hospital's medical imaging archive to an animation studio's render farm in an environment where 99% correct doesn’t cut it.

About the Senior MTS Role:

You'd work across our distributed storage engine and the services that help customers store, manage, and protect their data.

This includes a fault-tolerant block layer that erasure-codes and distributes data beneath the file system, a transactional file system where aggregates roll up as they change so a query across billions of files answers in real time instead of walking a tree, and that same machinery drives quotas, capacity trends, snapshot policy, multiple access protocols, plus replication and backup - all running in userspace.

All of which makes Qumulo a distributed operating system problem: scheduling, memory hierarchy, protection, and concurrency. We're AI-forward and specific about what that means. Agents may write code, but engineers own every design decision, and nothing ships that isn't right.

Why work at Qumulo?

Qumulo blends the flexibility of a startup with the security of a mature and profitable organization. Here you’ll work closely with a small team of smart, capable engineers - and the folks you interview with are the ones you’ll work alongside. Opinions are expected, disagreement is normal, and you'd own designs from ideation to release. We value quality, correctness, and performance. Our architecture, protocols, and patents are public, so you can read how most of this works before you talk to us - and we’re small enough that your work shows up in the product.

As a Senior Member of Technical Staff, you will:

• Design and build across the file system and block layer beneath it, in C and Rust
• Work with a team of super smart people to solve hard problems
• Take designs, including your own, from rough thesis to shipped code
• Get real leverage out of coding agents in an environment where being close isn't good enough
• Debug across protocol, file system, cache, network, and object store
• Find the correctness bugs that only surface under real world conditions
• Leave everything you touch better than you found it
• Prototype the next thing worth building and bring it to the team

Our recent work includes federating subtrees of the namespace across regions and clouds, keeping search indexes coherent with a namespace that keeps changing, and getting data to GPU clusters before they ask for it.

What we're looking for

• 6+ years building systems software, including something at the level of a file system, kernel, database engine, compiler, driver, or distributed data path
• You write C, C++, or Rust by choice
• You leverage AI coding tools every day, and you can point to something complex that you couldn't have built without them. You know where the tools break down, and delegate execution while retaining the judgement
• You've worked inside a real distributed system and can talk about concurrency, consistency, failure, and recovery from experience
• You go deep on root causes, and you're comfortable in code you didn't write
• Bonus points if you've worked on: distributed file systems, NFS, SMB, or S3. Platforms like NetApp, PowerScale, Isilon, VAST, WEKA, Ceph, or Lustre. Indexing, query, or search internals. A public open source contribution, write-up, or project you built.

Must be authorized to work in the United States. We are unable to provide visa sponsorship or transfer. This role is hybrid, based at our downtown Seattle HQ, targeting 3 days a week in-office.

The annual base pay range for this role is USD $200,000 - $300,000 plus pre-IPO stock options, flexible time-off, health, dental, and vision insurance, a 401(k) plan, internet stipend, EAP, and onsite parking or public transit subsidy.

About Qumulo:

Built for the most demanding enterprise workloads, from AI and HPC simulations to Splunk Observability, genomics and PACS medical imaging, geospatial datasets, media editing and rendering, and video surveillance, Qumulo unlocks the full power of an organization’s information. Our platform unifies file and object storage across data centers, edge, and public clouds, enabling efficient, accelerated computing and extending the reach of data unbound by protocol or transport limitations.

With more than 1,100 customers and exabytes of data under management, Qumulo powers mission-critical workloads anywhere real-time access to massive file datasets is non-negotiable. Qumulo delivers radical simplicity, hardware freedom, exceptional customer support, and a true hybrid-cloud architecture.

Our Values:

At Qumulo, we are building an open and collaborative culture where people can do their best work with customers as our magnetic field. We act as owners, we share by default, we are data driven and experimental and as an inclusive workplace, we encourage and celebrate multiple points of view. As part of our culture we believe diversity drives innovation.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

Qumulo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, military status, national origin, or any other characteristic protected under federal, state, or applicable local law. For more information on Qumulo's Applicant Privacy Policy, please visit: https://qumulo.com/applicant-employee-privacy-notice