Storage Systems Engineer

Location: San Francisco, CA, United States

This is a two-year contract of employment, inclusive of benefits. 

The Academic Research Services team at UCSF is seeking an Storage Systems Engineer (SYS ADM 4) to serve as a technical resource in the design, deployment, and operation of large-scale(multi petabytes) research storage and data infrastructure. This role will work in close partnership with the FAC Storage Lead to support UCSF’s evolving research ecosystem, including Physical/Virtual Compute, CoreHPC, the Research Analysis Environment (RAE), and large institutional storage initiatives.

This position is primarily responsible for architecture, implementation, and lifecycle management for the Facility for Advanced Computing (FAC), storage and systems, including support for large storage environments based on ZFS, NFS v3 and v4 & SAMBA(SMB) NSF-funded infrastructure, and OS Nexus–aligned data platforms. The role ensures seamless integration between storage systems and the Physical/Virtual Compute as well as CoreHPC compute cluster, enabling performant, reliable, and scalable data access for AI, data science, and computational research workloads.

The Storage Systems Engineer will:

• Work with the FAC Storage lead to continue supporting the design and evolution of storage architecture on ZFS across on-prem and hybrid environments, including ZFS, NFS, SMB VAST, parallel filesystems, and enterprise storage platforms 

• Develop and maintain data movement strategies and tooling (e.g., rsync, rclone, Globus, NFS, SMB workflows) to support large-scale data ingestion, migration, and lifecycle management 

• Ensure tight integration between storage and Physical/Virtual Compute as well as CoreHPC compute cluster systems, optimizing throughput, latency, and reliability for distributed workloads 

• Support and scale storage systems backing major institutional initiatives (FAC storage(ZFS), OS Nexus integration) 

• Collaborate closely with DevOps, networking, and security teams to deliver cohesive research infrastructure solutions 

• Design and implement monitoring, performance tuning, and capacity planning strategies for storage and data systems 

• Troubleshoot complex issues across storage, networking, and compute boundaries 

• Participate in system upgrades, migrations, and expansion efforts with minimal disruption to researchers 

• Provide guidance to researchers on data organization, transfer strategies, and performance optimization 

• Evaluate and recommend emerging storage technologies and architectures 

This role may lead storage-focused projects and contribute to cross-functional initiatives that improve the scalability, usability, and reliability of UCSF’s research computing ecosystem.

Department Overview 

Academic Research Systems (ARS) serves the needs of the UCSF research community by providing an integrated repository of HIPAA compliant clinical and life sciences data and a centralized, secure, professionally managed infrastructure for the storage and management of research data. ARS empowers medical scientific investigations by offering secure computing environments, data capture, management and analysis tools, and support services which meet researchers’ needs. 

The Research Infrastructure team of the Academic Research Service (ARS) focuses on large scale research platform support, high performance computational and storage services for UCSF researchers so they can address complex computational, AI, and data science problems.

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