Staff Engineer, Distributed Storage & Systems

modal; Town of Stockholm (NY); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal is seeking strong engineers to design, build, and maintain the novel, high-performance systems behind our serverless platform. You will work on the distributed object storage system powering container images, volumes, and checkpoints across datacenters, aiming to reduce latency and improve durability and cost at petabyte scale.

You will collaborate across the stack from local disk to distributed blob storage, with responsibilities including caching, preloading, garbage collection, and

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code.
• Built high-performance distributed storage or caching systems at a large scale.
• Strong cloud skills, including object storage (S3 or similar), CDNs, and related characteristics.
• Strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, page cache, containers).
• Willing to step into on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.

Responsibilities

• Build P2P sharing of data across workers within a single datacenter to dramatically reduce ingress.
• Replicate data across multiple blob storage providers.
• Automate garbage collection across hundreds of petabytes of data.
• Deploy colocated storage clusters to datacenters to accelerate high-throughput customer workloads.

Skills

Distributed systems

High-performance coding

Cloud familiarity

On-call readiness

Rust experience

Tools

Linux

CDNs

Object storage (S3)

Storage systems

Job description

Modal is seeking strong engineers to design, build, and maintain the novel, high-performance systems behind our serverless platform. You will work on the distributed object storage system powering container images, volumes, and checkpoints across datacenters, aiming to reduce latency and improve durability and cost at petabyte scale.

You will collaborate across the stack from local disk to distributed blob storage, with responsibilities including caching, preloading, garbage collection, and