Senior Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure

Backblaze External Website

3d•$175,000 - $200,000•Remote

About The Position

Backblaze is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to work on the data infrastructure platform that supports its B2 Object Storage and Computer Backup products. The role is responsible for infrastructure underlying the service and focuses on improving automation, observability, stability, and throughput while driving architectural changes to support long-term service requirements. The engineer will design automation and system-health tooling, extend observability and reporting capabilities, and lead technical work spanning multiple services and teams. The role includes taking large features from design through rollout, including migrations and backfills, and partnering with the on-call rotation to reduce recurring toil and improve incident response. Backblaze describes itself as a remote-work environment and seeks proactive communication, analytical problem solving, curiosity, and attention to detail. The base pay range for this US-based position is $175,000–$200,000. Backblaze is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Requirements

At least 7 years of backend development experience in an enterprise environment using an object-oriented or systems language such as Java, Rust, C++, C#, or Go.
Experience designing automation frameworks or platforms that other engineers build on.
Experience building large-scale software systems running on thousands of servers.
Experience building automation or tooling that other engineers depend on daily, such as internal platform services, operational tooling, or deployment and configuration pipelines.
Working knowledge of an observability stack such as Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, or Datadog, including service instrumentation and designing trusted alerts.
Strong Linux fundamentals and comfort operating in bare-metal or hybrid environments rather than fully managed cloud environments.
Professional experience incorporating AI-assisted development tools such as Gemini, Cursor, or Claude Code.
Comfort with all aspects of the software development lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, and rollout.
Curiosity and a willingness to understand a problem before proposing solutions.
Proactive communication in a remote environment, including keeping the team informed, surfacing blockers early, and moving work forward.
Analytical thinking when working on ambiguous problems.
Good attitude and willingness to do what it takes to get the job done.
Strong desire to work for a small, fast-paced company.
Desire to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technologies and work environments.
Rigorous adherence to best practices and relentless attention to detail.
Excellent interpersonal, oral, and written communication skills.
Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.

Nice To Haves

Proficiency in Java.
Experience with configuration management or infrastructure-as-code tools such as Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Chef, or Terraform.
Experience designing SLOs and error budgets, or reducing alert noise on a fleet at scale.
Experience with time-series databases and query languages such as PromQL.
Experience automating hardware lifecycle work, including burn-in, failure detection, drive replacement, and decommissioning.
Experience discovering and implementing performance improvements, including CPU and I/O improvements.
Understanding of Linux internals and file systems.
Familiarity with hard-drive performance and optimization, including host-managed SMR.
Experience building and interpreting models, dashboards, or reports.

Responsibilities

Design and build automation frameworks that enable engineers to provision, configure, and repair fleet infrastructure.
Design and extend the observability stack, including metrics, logs, traces, and alerts, to assess storage-platform health and identify degradation.
Build reporting, dashboards, and visualizations showing fleet health, capacity, and operational trends.
Build system-health tooling to detect failing hardware, configuration drift, and capacity risks before they cause incidents.
Lead technical design discussions and produce design documents for changes spanning multiple services and teams.
Drive large features from design through rollout, including required migration and backfill work.
Partner with the on-call rotation to turn recurring toil and incident findings into automation and better operational signals.