Lead Systems Software Engineer - Object Storage

Quantum Default Brand•Centennial, CO

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Lead Systems Software Engineer will act as the technical lead for the Centennial object storage team while remaining substantially hands-on. The role leads technical direction and architectural decisions across the team's areas of ownership, including the data path, durability, S3, and data movement. It involves designing and building critical components, leading design and code reviews, helping engineers solve complex systems problems, ensuring appropriate automated testing and CI coverage for critical changes, mentoring engineers, and partnering with the Software Engineering Manager / Product Owner on scope, sequencing, technical risk, and delivery. The engineer designs, implements, and optimizes features in the ActiveScale data path, handling S3 requests through durable storage across NVMe, HDD, and tape. The role also implements and extends the S3 API and improves latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability for exabyte-scale deployments. It owns complex durability and data-placement work, including two-dimensional erasure coding, and develops systems for moving and tiering data from NVMe through HDD to the ActiveScale Cold Storage tape tier. This is a hybrid role, with in-office work at the Centennial, CO office Tuesday through Thursday.

Requirements

10+ years of software development experience using Go, Python, C, C++, or Rust, or equivalent systems-level expertise; willingness to learn additional languages.
Strong experience with distributed systems and high-performance storage software design.
Strong Linux experience, including systems programming, debugging, profiling, and performance analysis of complex systems.
Solid understanding of concurrency, synchronization, locking, asynchronous programming, and memory management in performance-sensitive software.
Understanding of cloud and enterprise storage concepts and storage media characteristics, including HDD, SSD, NVMe, and tape.
Experience with object storage or S3-compatible APIs.
Demonstrated technical leadership of a team or significant engineering workstream.
Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across teams.

Nice To Haves

Experience with the Linux I/O subsystem and networking.
Knowledge of erasure coding principles.
Experience with storage protocols and clustering design and development.
Experience with REST, gRPC, or Thrift.
Experience with Amazon S3 APIs, SDKs, and tools.
Familiarity with OCaml; parts of the existing ActiveScale codebase are written in it.

Responsibilities

Act as technical lead for the Centennial object storage team while remaining substantially hands-on.
Lead technical direction and architectural decisions across the data path, durability, S3, and data movement.
Design and build critical components; lead design and code reviews; help engineers solve complex systems problems; and ensure appropriate automated testing and CI coverage for critical changes.
Mentor engineers and develop technical ownership across the team.
Partner with the Software Engineering Manager / Product Owner on scope, sequencing, technical risk, and delivery.
Design, implement, and optimize ActiveScale data-path features from incoming S3 requests through durable storage across NVMe, HDD, and tape.
Implement and extend the S3 API, ensuring correct protocol behavior and efficient request handling.
Improve I/O pipeline latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability for exabyte-scale deployments using Linux profiling and systems debugging.
Own durability and data-placement work, including two-dimensional erasure coding, and ensure correctness under node loss, disk faults, partial writes, and network partitions.
Analyze and optimize concurrency, throughput, and fault tolerance across request and storage paths.
Design and improve systems that move and tier data from NVMe through HDD to the tape cold-storage tier.
Drive the evolution of internal APIs, services, and interfaces supporting the data path and data mover.
Collaborate across teams, including with established ActiveScale engineering teams in Belgium.