Staff Engineer, Lustre

About the role

ddn is looking for a Staff Engineer with 10+ years of experience in distributed storage and Linux-based systems engineering. This is a hands-on senior technical role focused on design, debugging, performance and operational excellence across LustreFS and adjacent stack components. The ideal candidate has strong expertise in one or more Lustre subsystems, drives complex investigations independently and works with engineering, QE, support and release teams. Engineers who use AI to speed up triage, debugging, code comprehension and feature design are especially valued.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and debug LustreFS features, fixes and enhancements across subsystems such as llite, MDS/MDT, OSS/OST, LDLM and LNet.
• Investigate customer and scale-related defects, drive root-cause analysis and deliver high-quality fixes.
• Contribute to performance tuning, failure analysis and reliability improvements for large-scale Lustre deployments.
• Take part in code reviews, design reviews and subsystem discussions, and work with QE and support to reproduce issues and improve diagnostic data.
• Document subsystem behavior, debugging approaches, known failure patterns and operational best practices.
• Use AI-assisted tools to speed up issue triage, summarize logs, understand code and capture reusable lessons learned.

Required profile

• 10+ years of experience in systems software, distributed systems, storage, Linux kernel or filesystem engineering.
• Strong LustreFS experience with depth in at least one major subsystem.
• Ability to debug issues across client, server, network and backend storage layers.
• Strong collaboration skills in a fast-moving engineering environment.

Required skills

• Strong C programming and Linux systems debugging.
• Working knowledge of Linux kernel internals, filesystem semantics, networking and performance analysis.
• LNet and/or high-performance transports such as RDMA, InfiniBand, RoCE or TCP-based storage networking.
• Preferred: HPC or large-scale parallel storage experience, ZFS, ldiskfs, NVMe-backed storage, test plan creation and mentoring junior engineers.