Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre

DDNNorth Carolina, TexasJob.bopublished 10/19/2026
Must-have:BackendAISeniorPrincipalJunior

About the company

This role is central to building durable engineering redundancy in LustreFS: expanding deep subsystem ownership, reducing concentration risk, and accelerating next-generation delivery through strong engineering fundamentals and AI-enabled execution.

Your tasks

  • Design, develop and debug LustreFS features, fixes and enhancements across relevant subsystems such as llite, MDS/MDT, OSS/OST, LDLM and LNet.
  • Investigate customer and scale-related defects, drive root-cause analysis and implement high-quality fixes with strong attention to correctness and maintainability.
  • Contribute to performance tuning, failure analysis and reliability improvements for large-scale Lustre deployments.
  • Participate actively in code reviews, design reviews and subsystem discussions, bringing rigor to testing and operational readiness.
  • Work closely with QE and support to reproduce issues, improve diagnostic data quality and increase coverage for high-risk failure scenarios.
  • Help document subsystem behavior, debugging approaches, known failure patterns and operational best practices.
  • Use AI-assisted tools where appropriate to speed up issue triage, summarize logs, improve code understanding and capture reusable lessons learned.
  • Hands-on development and debugging of LustreFS defects, performance issues and subsystem enhancements.
  • Customer-facing and scale-related issue investigation across llite, metadata, object storage, LNet and transport layers.
  • Collaborative design and implementation of reliability, observability and serviceability improvements.
  • Reviewing and validating fixes through targeted tests, failure injection, log analysis and performance characterization.
  • Using AI-assisted workflows to accelerate triage, debug loops, code understanding and documentation quality.
  • Contributing to team redundancy by strengthening documentation, code review quality and subsystem knowledge sharing.

Requirements

Required Qualifications

  • 10+ years of experience in systems software, distributed systems, storage, Linux kernel or filesystem engineering.
  • Strong experience in LustreFS development, support or performance engineering with depth in at least one major subsystem.
  • Strong C programming and Linux systems debugging skills.
  • Working knowledge of Linux kernel internals, filesystem semantics, networking and performance analysis.
  • Experience with LNet and/or high-performance transports such as RDMA, InfiniBand, RoCE or TCP-based storage networking.
  • Ability to debug and resolve issues spanning multiple layers including client, server, network and backend storage.
  • Strong collaboration skills and the ability to work across functions in a fast-moving engineering environment.

Preferred Skills

  • Experience in HPC, AI infrastructure or large-scale parallel storage environments.
  • Exposure to metadata-heavy and throughput-heavy workload characterization and tuning.
  • Familiarity with ZFS, ldiskfs, NVMe-backed storage and related observability / performance tooling.
  • Experience creating test plans, reproducer frameworks, runbooks or diagnostic automation.
  • Comfort using AI tools to accelerate debugging, code reviews, triage, documentation and early-stage design ideation.
  • Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading focused technical efforts within a subsystem.