Storage Systems Lead — Petabyte-Scale, Distributed Platform

Linuxconfig; Northern, New York (KY, NY); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal is seeking a strong technical lead to guide engineers in designing and maintaining a high-performance, serverless storage system. You’ll steer the team responsible for hundreds of petabytes of data across cloud stores and a CDN, with on-call responsibilities and a hands-on approach across the stack.

You will set technical direction, own the roadmap from core primitives to architectural bets, and collaborate across filesystems, training, and sandboxes teams to optimize durability, latency,

Qualifications

• 7+ years writing high-quality production code.
• 3+ years people management, building teams and conducting performance reviews.
• Experience building high-performance distributed storage or caching systems at scale.
• Strong cloud skills with object storage and CDNs, incl. consistency and cost.
• Deep knowledge of Linux OS foundations (kernel, file systems, page cache, containers).
• Experience with replication and consistency models in multi-region/multi-cloud setups.
• Experience operating petabyte-scale storage, GC and capacity planning.
• Proven track record setting technical direction across teams.

Responsibilities

• Lead a 3-8 engineer team while staying hands-on across the stack.
• Set technical direction for primitives used by other teams (filesystems, training, sandboxes).
• Own the roadmap from petabyte-scale GC and replication to architectural bets.
• Balance durability, latency, throughput, and cost in the design.
• Oversee observability, automation, and on-call practices to keep systems healthy.

Skills

Distributed storage systems

Leadership / people management

Linux kernel knowledge

Cloud storage & CDN

On-call readiness

Tools

Rust (nice-to-have)

S3 / object storage

Job description

Modal is seeking a strong technical lead to guide engineers in designing and maintaining a high-performance, serverless storage system. You’ll steer the team responsible for hundreds of petabytes of data across cloud stores and a CDN, with on-call responsibilities and a hands-on approach across the stack.

You will set technical direction, own the roadmap from core primitives to architectural bets, and collaborate across filesystems, training, and sandboxes teams to optimize durability, latency,