Cloud Storage Test Engineer

Western Digital•Rochester, MN

1d•Onsite

About The Position

The Storage Test Engineer will serve as a hands-on technical contributor within Western Digital's System Integration & Test (SIT) lab, focused on deploying, operating, and validating clustered storage environments that accurately reflect real-world cloud and datacenter infrastructure. Working closely with the Clustered Storage Test team and HDD System Test groups, this engineer will configure scale-out storage clusters, design and execute various workloads and SLA validation tests, measure and analyze system and drive performance, and monitor drive health telemetry. This role is ideal for an engineer with 2–6 years of experience in storage systems or infrastructure who is ready to go deep on distributed storage behavior, performance characterization, and large-scale fleet operations.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
2–6 years of hands-on experience in storage systems, distributed infrastructure, or storage test and validation engineering.
Familiarity with scale-out storage architectures and an understanding of how distributed object or block storage clusters are structured, scaled, and managed in production environments.
Exposure to S3-compatible object storage (MinIO, AWS S3, or equivalent), including operational concepts such as bucket management, erasure coding, and performance benchmarking.
Strong Linux command-line proficiency; comfort working in a physical lab environment with servers, HBAs, JBODs, and storage controllers.
Solid scripting ability (Python, Bash, or similar) sufficient for automating test execution, parsing results, and building lightweight data-processing utilities.

Nice To Haves

Familiarity with drive health monitoring and telemetry — including SMART attribute collection, error log analysis, and correlating drive-level signals with system-level performance observations.
Exposure to rack-level storage deployment practices: server racking, HBA and storage controller configuration, JBOD/JBOF cabling and validation.
Familiarity of erasure coding and how EC parity levels affect storage efficiency, durability, and rebuild performance under drive failure conditions.
Experience with fleet management concepts or tooling for tracking and auditing large inventories of physical storage devices across a lab or datacenter environment.
Familiarity with SLA testing methodologies — defining availability and durability targets, instrumenting measurement, and validating cluster behavior against those targets under both normal and degraded conditions.
Experience with storage benchmarking tools such as Warp, fio, vdbench, or similar workload generators.
Experience with automation tools like Docker, Ansible, Grafana, etc.
Knowledge of distributed storage platforms such as Ceph, HDFS, or similar open-source cluster software.
Familiarity with datacenter infrastructure management practices including asset lifecycle tracking, capacity planning, and hardware refresh operations.
Experience building automated test reports or data pipelines that collect, process, and present performance and health metrics from distributed storage systems — including scheduled report generation, results dashboards, or trend-tracking tooling that surfaces patterns across long-run test campaigns.

Responsibilities

Deploy and operate scale-out storage environments — including multi-node object storage clusters, erasure-coded pools, and rack-level storage deployments — configured to emulate real customer datacenter architectures at lab scale.
Measure and analyze storage system and drive performance — characterizing throughput, IOPS, and latency distributions across workload profiles including AI/ML data access patterns, backup and restore traffic, cloud object storage, and web-serving workloads — and producing clear performance reports with root-cause observations.
Identify and investigate performance anomalies by correlating cluster-level metrics with drive-level telemetry, distinguishing between platform bottlenecks, configuration issues, and drive-level contributors to throughput or latency degradation.
Analyze technical customer workload studies and translate key variables into realistic test scenarios and validation methodologies.
Instrument and monitor drive health telemetry — collecting and trending SMART attributes, Error Logs, I/O error rates, and temperature data — to identify early failure indicators and correlate drive health signals with observed cluster performance during long-run experiments.
Contribute to fleet management processes for the lab's HDD inventory, supporting tracking of drive state, physical location, test assignment, and lifecycle status across large populations of test drives.
Assist with datacenter infrastructure management tasks including rack-level storage deployments, drive swap procedures, firmware staging, and hardware validation during active cluster tests.
Document test configurations, performance results, and failure analyses in detailed technical write-ups that allow peer engineers to reproduce experiments, compare results across configurations, and build on prior findings.
Collaborate with senior engineers to identify gaps between existing test methodologies and modern cloud storage deployment patterns, then help design and implement updated test scenarios, workload mixes, or cluster configurations that close those gaps.
Evaluate storage benchmarking tools and workload generators, assessing their suitability for emulating specific customer traffic profiles and recommending configurations that produce the most representative and actionable results.

Benefits

paid vacation time
paid sick leave
medical/dental/vision insurance
life, accident and disability insurance
tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
employee assistance program
other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
tuition reimbursement
transit
the Applause Program
employee stock purchase plan
the WD Savings 401(k) Plan