Senior Staff Engineer

DDN; Santa Clara (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

DDN is hiring for a Staff Software Engineer to own the design of our cloud control plane and the software-defined storage layer. You’ll drive architecture, lead prototypes, and deliver scalable, reliable solutions for both cloud-native and on-premises environments.

You will define the end-to-end architecture, implement components, review code, and collaborate with a team of engineers to release high-quality products. Occasional travel may be required as teams align on milestones.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software development experience across file systems, concurrency, distributed systems, or server architecture.
• Strong hands-on experience with C/C++ on Linux/UNIX systems.
• Direct experience with scale-out, high-availability storage solutions.
• Comfort spanning both cloud-native architecture and on-premises infrastructure realities.
• Deep storage or file-system knowledge (e.g. Lustre, GPFS) valued but not mandatory.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the architecture of a cloud-hosted control plane, including containerization, microservices, and orchestration.
• Participate in the implementation of scalable software defined storage components.
• Drive design discussions, build prototypes and contribute to deliver high quality products.
• Conduct code reviews and improve scalability, stability, reliability and performance of solutions.
• Collaborate with your teammates and integrate a group of passionate developers in an outcome-oriented environment.
• Work closely with program management in the successful delivery of product releases.
• Contribute to and validate product documentation.
• Effectively manage, engage and complete projects as they are assigned to the role.
• Provide regular reports on project progress and activity updates.
• Ability to travel as may be required from time to time (e.g. for team meetings, training)

Skills

C/C++

Linux/UNIX

Distributed systems

File systems

Software architecture

Scale-out storage

Job description

Company

DDN has spent 25+ years building the infrastructure behind the world's most demanding computing environments - powering 48 of the top 100 supercomputers. Backed by $300M from Blackstone at a $5B valuation and deep partnerships with NVIDIA, Supermicro, and Google Cloud, we're moving faster than ever. The AI boom has created unprecedented demand for exactly the kind of high-performance storage DDN has spent decades perfecting.

The Role

This role sits right at the center of that momentum. We're building our next-generation storage platform - designed from the ground up to solve the problems our existing products haven't fully cracked. You won't be maintaining someone else's architecture. You'll be defining it.

On paper this is a "Staff Software Engineer" role. In practice, you're the architect. You'll own the design of our cloud control plane - the web application layer, the cloud services, observability, supportability - the whole nervous system that sits above our on-prem storage. And when something's genuinely hard and an engineer is stuck, you're the person who rolls up their sleeves and fixes it yourself.

You will:

• Define and drive the architecture of a cloud-hosted control plane, including containerization, microservices, and orchestration

• Participate in the implementation of scalable software defined storage components

• Drive design discussions, build prototypes and contribute to deliver high quality products

• Conduct code reviews and improve scalability, stability, reliability and performance of solutions.

• Collaborate with your teammates and integrate a group of passionate developers in an outcome-oriented environment.

• Work closely with program management in the successful delivery of product releases

• Contribute to and validate product documentation

• Effectively manage, engage and complete projects as they are assigned to the role

• Provide regular reports on project progress and activity updates

• Ability to travel as may be required from time to time (e.g. for team meetings, training)

Experience:

• 10+ years of software development experience across file systems, concurrency, distributed systems, or server architecture

• Strong hands-on experience with C/C++ on Linux/UNIX systems

• Direct experience with scale-out, high-availability storage solutions

• Comfort spanning both cloud-native architecture and on-premises infrastructure realities

• Deep storage or file-system knowledge (e.g. Lustre, GPFS) is valued but not mandatory - candidates with strong architectural range and hands-on ability, and some storage exposure, are equally encouraged to apply

This is an opportunity to shape a new product from its architectural foundation, within a company with genuine history, credibility, and current momentum.