Senior / Staff NFS Engineer

Department: Top Level - By Department

Location: Remote - California

Employment Type: FullTime

Why this role is compelling

At DDN, you will work on problems that sit at the heart of modern infrastructure:

• Scaling and optimizing Network File Systems

• Building and improving distributed file systems and object storage

• Tuning performance across kernel-level and user-space I/O stacks

• Working with NVMe, SSDs, RDMA, and high-speed networking

• Integrating storage platforms into Kubernetes-native environments

• Using Python to automate, debug, test, and improve complex systems

Your work will directly influence how high-performance data platforms behave under real-world load, not just in theory.

What you’ll do

• Design, build, and optimize features across DDN’s NFS and storage stack

• Diagnose bottlenecks across file systems, storage media, networking, and I/O paths

• Improve performance, scalability, and resiliency in distributed storage environments

• Work across kernel-space and user-space components to solve hard systems problems

• Collaborate with engineers across storage, systems, and platform layers

• Develop tooling and automation in Python to improve observability, testing, and operations

• Help shape the next generation of infrastructure for AI and data-intensive workloads

What we’re looking for

• Strong hands-on experience with Network File Systems (NFS)

• Deep understanding of distributed file systems

• Experience with object storage

• Production experience with Kubernetes

• Strong Python skills

• Experience working on kernel-level and/or user-space I/O stacks

• Familiarity with NVMe, SSDs, RDMA, and high-speed networking

• A systems mindset: you know how to debug complex performance and reliability issues across layers

You’ll thrive here if

• You are energized by low-level systems work

• You like solving problems most engineers avoid because they are too deep, too subtle, or too performance-sensitive

• You care about the details of how storage and networking behave under pressure

• You want your work to matter in environments where performance is mission-critical

This role is probably not for you if

• Your background is primarily general backend, SRE, or platform engineering without deep storage/filesystem ownership

• You’ve used storage systems, but haven’t built or debugged them at a systems level

• You prefer abstraction layers over getting hands-on with performance, I/O paths, and infrastructure internals

• You want a role focused on coordination more than engineering depth