Storage Systems Lead, Petabyte-Scale Distributed Storage

Mixpeek; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 380,000; Full time

Job summary

Modal is seeking a strong technical lead to guide engineers designing and maintaining a high-performance distributed storage system that underpins container images, volumes, and checkpoints. You will set architectural direction, own the roadmap, and balance durability and cost across multi-cloud deployments.

You will stay hands-on across the stack, overseeing garbage collection, replication, and performance optimizations while driving observability and on-call readiness.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production-grade coding experience.
• 3+ years of people management, leading teams through planning and performance.
• Experience building high-performance distributed storage or caching at scale.
• Strong cloud skills with object storage, CDNs, and cost considerations.
• Deep knowledge of Linux kernel, file systems, page cache, containers.
• Experience with replication and consistency models in multi-region or multi-cloud deployments.
• Experience operating storage systems at petabyte scale and owning cost planning.
• Track record of setting technical direction and driving architectural decisions.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotation and incidents.

Responsibilities

• Lead the team of engineers, guiding design and implementation of the serverless storage platform.
• Set technical direction for primitives used by other teams (filesystems, training, sandboxes).
• Own the roadmap from current hard problems to architectural bets on blobnet concepts.
• Balance durability, latency, throughput, and cost across systems and deployments.
• Manage a small team while staying hands-on across stack from disk to distributed storage.
• Improve observability, automation, and on-call practices to keep systems healthy.

Skills

Production-grade coding

People management

Distributed storage systems

Cloud storage & CDN

Linux kernel & OS

Replication & consistency

Petabyte-scale data

On-call responsiveness

Architecture direction

Tools

Rust

Job description

Modal is seeking a strong technical lead to guide engineers designing and maintaining a high-performance distributed storage system that underpins container images, volumes, and checkpoints. You will set architectural direction, own the roadmap, and balance durability and cost across multi-cloud deployments.

You will stay hands-on across the stack, overseeing garbage collection, replication, and performance optimizations while driving observability and on-call readiness.