Senior Staff Engineer, Data Path — Distributed Systems

Data Direct Networks; California (MO); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Highly Competitive Vacation Plans

Paid Holidays

Bonus Programs

Tuition Reimbursement

Employee Referral Program

Excellent Medical, Dental and Vision

Paid Leave Programs

Anniversary and Recognition Awards

Job summary

Data Direct Networks (DDN) is seeking a Sr Staff Engineer – Data Path to design, develop, and optimize the data path within a distributed storage and data services platform. You will focus on scalable, low-latency data movement and work hands-on across the stack as a technical leader.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams and mentors others while shaping architecture, performance, and reliability for enterprise-scale systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of experience in systems software, distributed systems, or infrastructure engineering.
• Strong experience designing and implementing performance-critical software components.
• Proficiency in C/C++ or similar systems programming languages.
• Solid understanding of operating systems fundamentals, concurrency, memory management, and networking concepts.
• Proven ability to work independently on complex technical 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, primarily in systems‑level languages (e.g., C/C++).
• Analyze and optimize data movement across CPU, memory, storage, and network layers.
• Identify performance bottlenecks and drive solutions through profiling, benchmarking, and tuning.
• Establish performance baselines and contribute to regression detection and prevention strategies.
• Act as a technical authority within the data path domain, influencing designs across teams.
• Lead design reviews and provide guidance on complex technical challenges.
• Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers on systems design, performance engineering, and best practices.

Skills

C/C++

Systems programming

Performance optimization

Distributed systems

Concurrency

Operating systems

Networking concepts

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Job description

Data Direct Networks (DDN) is seeking a Sr Staff Engineer – Data Path to design, develop, and optimize the data path within a distributed storage and data services platform. You will focus on scalable, low-latency data movement and work hands-on across the stack as a technical leader.

You will collaborate with cross-functional teams and mentors others while shaping architecture, performance, and reliability for enterprise-scale systems.