Senior Software Engineer - Storage Control Plane

Lambda; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Cash & equity

Health, dental, vision

Wellness stipend

401k with match

Flexible PTO

Job summary

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is building the world's premier AI cloud storage platform in the San Francisco Bay Area. We seek a Senior Software Engineer to join the storage team, developing next‑generation storage software for a multi‑vendor, multi‑protocol environment that powers AI training and inference across petabyte-scale datasets.

You will design scalable control planes, implement declarative abstractions, and lead orchestration with Kubernetes, while ensuring security,

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
• 5+ years of experience in software development for storage systems.
• Proven experience with distributed systems programming and concepts such as load balancers, data-durability, consensus algorithms, fault tolerance, and data consistency.
• Strong programming skills in languages such as C, C++, Go, or Python.
• Experience with Linux kernel internals and system-level programming.
• Experience with one or more storage protocols (e.g. S3, NFS) and file systems such as Ceph, DAOS, or similar.
• Familiarity with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes and running production workloads in these environments.
• Familiarity with CI/CD and QA practices for distributed systems development environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and build a vendor-agnostic control plane that provisions, scales, heals, and meters storage across platforms (VAST Data, WEKA, DDN, Pure, NetApp, Ceph, MinIO).
• Define the internal abstraction layer to hide vendor APIs behind a single declarative interface.
• Build reconciliation-loop and CRD-based orchestration (Kubernetes controllers, operators, custom schedulers).
• Own multi-tenant isolation end to end: namespace, per-tenant QoS and rate limiting, credential lifecycle, blast-radius containment.
• Design the capacity and placement engine: PCIe/topology aware, NUMA-aware, failure-domain-aware.
• Instrument the observability pipeline with SLI/SLO definitions and fleet-wide performance regression detection.

Skills

Distributed systems

C/C++

Go

Python

Linux kernel

Storage protocols

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in Computer Science

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Ceph

DAOS

Job description

Lambda, The Superintelligence Cloud, is a leader in AI cloud infrastructure serving tens of thousands of customers. Our customers range from AI researchers to enterprises and hyperscalers. Lambda's mission is to make compute as ubiquitous as electricity and give everyone the power of superintelligence. One person, one GPU.

If you'd like to build the world's best AI cloud, join us.

*Note: This position requires presence in our San Francisco or Bellevue office location 4 days per week; Lambda’s designated work-from-home day is currently Tuesday.

In the world of distributed AI training and inference, raw GPU and CPU horsepower is just a part of the story. High-performance networking and storage are the critical components that enable and unite these systems, making groundbreaking AI training and inference possible.

The Lambda Infrastructure Engineering organization forges the foundation of high-performance AI clusters by welding together the latest in AI storage, networking, GPU and CPU hardware.

Our expertise lies at the intersection of:

• High-Performance Distributed Storage Solutions and Protocols: We engineer the protocols and systems that serve massive datasets at the speeds demanded by modern clustered GPUs.

• Dynamic Networking: We design advanced networks that provide multi-tenant security and intelligent routing without compromising performance, using the latest in AI networking hardware.

• Compute Clustering and Virtualization: We enable cutting-edge virtualization and clustering that allows AI researchers and engineers to focus on AI workloads, not AI infrastructure, unleashing the full compute bandwidth of clustered GPUs.

AI training and inference relies on petabytes of data hosted on large, high-performance storage arrays. At Lambda, the Infrastructure Storage Team’s job is to ensure that the data powering AI is fast, performant, and available across a variety of access protocols (fit for purpose).

We're looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to join our storage team. You'll join a team responsible for developing and implementing our next-generation storage software. This role requires expertise in distributed systems, and an in-depth understanding of file, block, and object storage protocols. You'll work on building scalable and resilient storage control plane that power our AI and machine learning infrastructure.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build a vendor-agnostic control plane that provisions, scales, heals, and meters storage across the platforms our customers actually demand, VAST Data, WEKA, DDN, Pure, NetApp, Ceph, MinIO, and the ones that don't exist yet.

• Define the internal abstraction layer that hides vendor-specific APIs, failure semantics, QoS knobs, and telemetry formats behind one declarative interface, so a new vendor integration is a driver, not a re-architecture.

• Build reconciliation-loop and CRD-based orchestration (Kubernetes controllers, operators, custom schedulers) that manages capacity, tenancy, encryption domains, and placement across data centers and availability zones.

• Own multi-tenant isolation end to end: namespace and subsystem partitioning, per-tenant QoS and rate limiting, credential and key lifecycle, blast-radius containment, noisy-neighbor detection.

• Design the capacity and placement engine: PCIe-topology-aware, NUMA-aware, failure-domain-aware. On our platforms a drive behind the same PCIe switch as the GPU it serves beats a faster drive on a different root port, and the control plane needs to know that.

• Instrument everything: SLI/SLO definitions, fleet-wide performance regression detection, and the observability pipeline that makes a petabyte fleet debuggable at 3 a.m.

You

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a related field.

• 5+ years of experience in software development for storage systems.

• Proven experience with distributed systems programming and concepts such as load balancers, data-durability, consensus algorithms, fault tolerance, and data consistency.

• Strong programming skills in languages such as C, C++, Go, or Python.

• Experience with Linux kernel internals and system-level programming.

• Experience with one or more storage protocols (e.g. S3, NFS) and file systems such as Ceph, DAOS, or similar.

• Familiarity with containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes and running production workloads in these environments.

• Familiarity with CI/CD and QA practices for distributed systems development environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AI/ML workloads and the unique storage challenges they present.

• Knowledge of data center networking and high-speed interconnects (e.g., InfiniBand, RoCE).

• Experience with performance tuning and optimization of storage systems.

• Familiarity with hardware acceleration technologies, specifically GPUs and DPUs.

• Production experience with VAST Data, WEKA, DDN, Pure, NetApp, or IBM Storage Scale.

• Ceph at 100 PB+ in HPC or AI environments.

• CXL memory pooling, computational storage, ZNS SSDs, EDSFF.

• Published or presented at SNIA SDC, FAST, USENIX ATC, LSFMM+BPF, OCP, SC, or similar.

Salary Range Information

The annual salary range for this position has been set based on market data and other factors. However, a salary higher or lower than this range may be appropriate for a candidate whose qualifications differ meaningfully from those listed in the job description.

About Lambda

• Founded in 2012, with 500+ employees, and growing fast
• Our investors notably include TWG Global, US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT), Andra Capital, SGW, Andrej Karpathy, ARK Invest, Fincadia Advisors, G Squared, In-Q-Tel (IQT), KHK & Partners, NVIDIA, Pegatron, Supermicro, Wistron, Wiwynn, Gradient Ventures, Mercato Partners, SVB, 1517, and Crescent Cove
• We have research papers accepted at top machine learning and graphics conferences, including NeurIPS, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, and TOG
• Our values are publicly available: https://lambda.ai/careers
• We offer generous cash & equity compensation
• Health, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents
• Wellness and commuter stipends for select roles
• 401k Plan with 2% company match (USA employees)
• Flexible paid time off plan that we all actually use

Equal Opportunity Employer

Lambda is an Equal Opportunity employer. Applicants are considered without regard to race, color, religion, creed, national origin, age, sex, gender, marital status, sexual orientation and identity, genetic information, veteran status, citizenship, or any other factors prohibited by local, state, or federal law.