Overview:
This is an incredible opportunity to be part of a company that has been at the forefront of AI and high-performance data storage innovation for over two decades. DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a global market leader renowned for powering many of the world’s most demanding AI data centers, in industries ranging from life sciences and healthcare to financial services, autonomous cars, Government, academia, research and manufacturing.

“THE REAL DIFFERENTIATOR IS DDN. I NEVER HESITATE TO RECOMMEND DDN. DDN IS THE DE FACTO NAME FOR AI STORAGE IN HIGH PERFORMANCE ENVIRONMENTS” - MARC HAMILTON, VP, SOLUTIONS ARCHITECTURE & ENGINEERING | NVIDIA

DDN is the global leader in AI and multi-cloud data management at scale. Our cutting-edge data intelligence platform is designed to accelerate AI workloads, enabling organizations to extract maximum value from their data. With a proven track record of performance, reliability, and scalability, DDN empowers businesses to tackle the most challenging AI and data-intensive workloads with confidence.
Our success is driven by our unwavering commitment to innovation, customer-centricity, and a team of passionate professionals who bring their expertise and dedication to every project. This is a chance to make a significant impact at a company that is shaping the future of AI and data management.
Our commitment to innovation, customer success, and market leadership makes this an exciting and rewarding role for a driven professional looking to make a lasting impact in the world of AI and data storage.
Job Description:
We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer who is deeply passionate about distributed storage systems, with a particular focus on object storage at scale. At DDN, we’re building the next generation of object storage capabilities to meet the demands of AI, analytics, and hyperscale workloads.
In this role, you will define the technical roadmap, mentor engineers, and lead the architecture and implementation of features that push the boundaries of performance, availability, scalability, and durability in distributed object storage systems.
This is a technical leadership role at the core of one of our most strategic platform layers. You’ll work across functional boundaries — collaborating with platform, metadata, and performance teams — to deliver robust, AI-ready storage infrastructure for the most demanding workloads on Earth.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 10+ years of experience in distributed systems or storage engineering, with deep hands-on experience in object storage (e.g., S3, Ceph, MinIO, Scality).
• Expertise in C/C++, Rust, or Go with a strong understanding of performance profiling, memory management, and multi-threading.
• Solid understanding of storage constructs like erasure coding, consistency protocols, tiering, replication, and access control.
• Proven track record of designing scalable systems with high availability and low latency under real-world workloads.
• Experience mentoring engineers, leading complex codebases, and aligning technical work to product strategy.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience working on high-performance storage for AI/ML data pipelines or HPC environments.
• Familiarity with cloud-native storage APIs, S3 compatibility layers, and Kubernetes-based deployments.
• Understanding of file-to-object transition patterns and hybrid storage architectures.
• Contributions to open-source storage frameworks or prior experience in highly scalable storage startups.
  This position requires participation in an on-call rotation to provide after-hours support as needed.