Sr/Staff Lustre Engineer

Data Direct Networks•San Francisco - Remote, CA

13d

About The Position

This role is a chance to work on demanding storage engineering problems, focusing on designing, building, optimizing, and upstreaming features for the next generation of high-performance, enterprise-ready Lustre capabilities. The ideal candidate will be comfortable working in kernel-space C, analyzing performance bottlenecks in large-scale deployments, and collaborating with senior engineers to evolve Lustre architecture for modern infrastructure.

Requirements

7+ years of progressive, hands-on Lustre software development experience.
A strong track record of meaningful contributions to the Lustre codebase in production or open-source environments.
Demonstrated success designing, implementing, and upstreaming Lustre features that made it into major releases.
Deep understanding of Lustre internals, including MDS/OSS architecture, LDLM locking and recovery, journaling, DNE, DoM, FLD, layout, quota, and security.
Expert-level C programming and strong Linux kernel development experience.
Strong knowledge of distributed systems, parallel file systems, and high-performance I/O.
Experience with Lustre build, development, and debugging tooling such as lctl, llstat, strace, perf, and kernel tracers.
Python and/or Bash skills for tooling and automation.
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field.
Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts effectively.

Nice To Haves

7+ years in HPC or storage software development.
Visible contributions to the Lustre open-source community, including accepted patches, LUG participation, or public technical talks.
Experience running or developing Lustre in cloud environments such as AWS FSx for Lustre, Azure Lustre, or custom cloud deployments.
Familiarity with adjacent systems such as Ceph, DAOS, BeeGFS, WekaIO, or GPFS.
Exposure to RDMA, NVMe-oF, CXL, computational storage, or AI/ML I/O workloads.
Conference presentations, technical publications, or other public engineering contributions.

Responsibilities

Contribute to Lustre architecture and lead implementation of new features across core subsystems including MDS/OSS, LDLM, DNE, DoM, FLD, layout, snapshot, quota, security, and recovery.
Write high-performance, production-grade code across the Lustre kernel module, user-space utilities, and supporting libraries.
Own the full development lifecycle for major features, from design and coding through testing, performance tuning, and upstream patch submission.
Improve scalability for multi-petabyte Lustre environments, including metadata performance, I/O path optimization, and integration with modern interconnects and storage fabrics.
Modernize Lustre internals through kernel API updates, locking improvements, RDMA enhancements, and cloud/container-oriented capabilities.
Prototype and evaluate emerging technologies such as NVMe-oF, CXL, and other next-generation storage approaches for potential Lustre integration.
Strengthen regression, stress, and performance validation using tools such as IOR, mdtest, fio, and custom Lustre test tooling.
Perform deep code-level performance analysis using Lustre tracing tools, perf, lockstat, and kernel profilers.
Work closely with Principal Engineers, hardware teams, and application owners to translate real workload needs into practical Lustre improvements.
Mentor other developers and contribute design docs, technical guides, and engineering reviews.