Lead Systems Software Engineer - Object Storage

LT ZERO Asia Pacific•Centennial, CO

2d•$160,000 - $200,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Lead Systems Software Engineer will serve as the technical lead for the Centennial object storage team while remaining substantially hands-on. The role drives technical direction and architectural decisions across the data path, durability, S3, and data movement. It designs and builds critical components, leads design and code reviews, helps engineers solve complex systems problems, and ensures appropriate automated testing and CI coverage for critical changes. The engineer mentors team members, develops technical ownership across the team, and partners with the Software Engineering Manager / Product Owner on scope, sequencing, technical risk, and delivery. The role designs, implements, and optimizes features in the ActiveScale data path, from incoming S3 requests through durable storage across NVMe, HDD, and tape. It implements and extends the S3 API and improves I/O pipeline latency, throughput, scalability, and reliability for exabyte-scale deployments, using Linux profiling and systems debugging. It owns complex durability and data-placement work, including two-dimensional erasure coding, and ensures correctness under node loss, disk faults, partial writes, and network partitions. It also designs and improves data-tiering and movement from NVMe through HDD to the ActiveScale Cold Storage tape tier, and evolves internal APIs, services, and interfaces supporting the data path and data mover. This is a hybrid role requiring in-office work at the Centennial, Colorado office Tuesday through Thursday. The anticipated salary range is $160,000 to $200,000 for qualified applicants; compensation within the range depends on factors including relevant experience, knowledge and education, skills and abilities, internal equity, and budgetary considerations.

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, including with established ActiveScale engineering teams in Belgium.

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 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 to 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.