Staff Engineer - Customer Facing

DDN; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

DDN is seeking a Staff Engineer for the Infinia Core team, a hands-on role combining deep distributed-systems engineering with direct customer engagement in production environments.

You will own complex escalations end-to-end, drive incident response, and mentor engineers while advancing AI/automation for reliability and diagnostics. This role requires strong technical depth and customer impact.

Qualifications

• Significant experience in enterprise storage, distributed systems or cloud infrastructure with leadership at Senior/Staff level.
• Proficiency in Linux, kernel troubleshooting and debugging.
• Strong coding ability in Python or C++.
• Experience diagnosing complex issues with diagnostic tools.

Responsibilities

• Communicate technical issues clearly to customers, engineers and executives.
• Own complex customer escalations from diagnosis to resolution and RCA.
• Lead live incident response and cross-functional investigations.
• Debug distributed systems, storage and performance issues across layers.
• Reproduce customer issues and feed findings into product improvements.
• Develop runbooks, troubleshooting guidance and performance-tuning practices.
• Mentor engineers and influence architectural best practices.
• Partner with Field CTOs, Solutions Architects and Sales Engineers on strategic issues.
• Use AI, automation and observability to improve diagnostics and MTTR.
• Participate in on-call rotation for after-hours support.

Skills

Enterprise storage

Distributed systems

Cloud infrastructure

Python

C++

Linux troubleshooting

Technical leadership

Customer engagement

Tools

Prometheus

Grafana

ELK

OpenTelemetry

Job description

DDN is seeking a Staff Engineer to join our Infinia Core team. This is a hands‑on technical role combining deep distributed‑systems engineering with direct engagement with customers running Infinia in production.

You’ll own complex technical escalations end‑to‑end, from root‑cause analysis and incident response through to mitigation, customer communication and product improvements. You’ll also help shape engineering best practice, mentor other engineers and drive the use of AI and automation to improve reliability and diagnostics.

If you love the technical depth but want to stay behind the curtain, this probably isn’t the right fit but if you want to combine serious engineering with real customer impact, read on.

About Infinia

Infinia is DDN’s next‑generation, software‑defined storage platform, built from the ground up for AI and accelerated computing. It combines separate control and data planes, all‑flash performance, sub‑millisecond latency and multi‑tenancy for demanding enterprise and hyperscale AI and GPU workloads.

What You’ll Do

• Communicate technical issues clearly to customers, engineers and senior stakeholders, including executive audiences.

• Own complex customer escalations from diagnosis through to resolution, mitigation and RCA.

• Lead live incident response, war rooms and cross‑functional investigations with Engineering, QA and Field teams.

• Debug complex distributed‑systems, storage and performance issues across the system, protocol and application layers.

• Reproduce customer issues and feed findings into product and reliability improvements.

• Develop runbooks, troubleshooting guidance and performance‑tuning practices.

• Act as a technical authority on Infinia internals, mentoring engineers and influencing architectural best practice.

• Partner with Field CTOs, Solutions Architects and Sales Engineers on strategic customer issues.

• Use AI, automation and observability to improve diagnostics, reliability and MTTR.

• Communicate technical issues clearly to customers, engineers and senior stakeholders, including executive audiences.

• This position requires participation in an on‑call rotation to provide after‑hours support as needed.

What You’ll Bring

Must‑Haves

• Significant experience in enterprise storage, distributed systems or cloud infrastructure, with technical leadership at Senior or Staff level.

• Deep understanding of file systems and storage technologies, including S3, POSIX, NFS and storage performance.

• Strong Linux systems knowledge, including kernel‑level troubleshooting and debugging.

• Strong coding ability in Python or C++.

• Proven ability to diagnose complex issues using tools such as strace, tcpdump and perf.

• Genuine interest in working directly with customers and taking ownership of complex problems through to resolution.

Nice‑to‑Haves

• Experience with DDN, VAST, Weka or similar scale‑out storage/file systems.

• Familiarity with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK or OpenTelemetry.

• Knowledge of replication, consistency models and data integrity mechanisms.

• Experience supporting AI/ML, LLM training or other high‑performance computing environments.

• Experience using AI tools for log analysis, troubleshooting, automated RCA or reducing MTTR.