Sustaining Engineer - L4

About the role

DDN is looking for a Sustaining Engineer (L4) to join its Infinia Core team. This is a senior, technical engineering role focused on owning complex customer escalations end-to-end, from root-cause analysis and incident response through to mitigation, customer communication and product improvements. The engineer will also help shape engineering best practice, mentor others and drive the use of AI and automation to improve reliability and diagnostics.

Key responsibilities

• Communicate technical issues clearly to customers, engineers and senior stakeholders, including executives.
• Own complex customer escalations from diagnosis through resolution, mitigation and RCA.
• Lead live incident response, war rooms and cross-functional investigations with Engineering, QA and Field teams.
• Debug complex distributed-systems, storage and performance issues across system, protocol and application layers.
• Reproduce customer issues and feed findings into product and reliability improvements.
• Develop runbooks, troubleshooting guidance and performance-tuning practices.
• Act as a technical authority on Infinia internals, mentoring engineers and influencing architectural best practice.
• Partner with Field CTOs, Solutions Architects and Sales Engineers on strategic customer issues.
• Use AI, automation and observability to improve diagnostics, reliability and MTTR.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for after-hours support.

Required profile

• Significant experience in enterprise storage, distributed systems or cloud infrastructure, with technical leadership at Senior or Staff level.
• Deep understanding of file systems and storage technologies, including S3, POSIX, NFS and storage performance.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge, including kernel-level troubleshooting and debugging.
• Strong coding ability in Python or C++.
• Proven ability to diagnose complex issues with tools such as strace, tcpdump and perf.
• Genuine interest in working directly with customers and owning complex problems through to resolution.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with DDN, VAST, Weka or similar scale-out storage/file systems.
• Familiarity with observability platforms such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK or OpenTelemetry.
• Knowledge of replication, consistency models and data integrity mechanisms.
• Experience supporting AI/ML, LLM training or other high-performance computing environments.
• Experience using AI tools for log analysis, automated RCA or reducing MTTR.