The Senior Staff Engineer for AI Data Path at DDN is a remote position based in California focused on leading the hands-on development and integration of advanced storage systems with next-generation AI inference pipelines. This role is ideal for an experienced infrastructure professional with a strong background in distributed storage who wants to build production-grade AI infrastructure.
Role Overview
DDN is seeking an experienced engineer to lead coding, prototyping, and rapid iteration on solutions in close collaboration with architects to design and deliver high-performance data movement architectures. The professional in this role will leverage NVIDIA’s NIXL alongside the Infinia Data Intelligence Platform to enable ultra-low-latency, high-throughput data movement across GPU, memory, and distributed storage layers.
Key Responsibilities
Lead the design and implementation of high-performance data movement pipelines using NVIDIA NIXL across GPU, CPU, and storage tiers.
Architect and drive integration of DDN Infinia with GPU-accelerated inference platforms for large-scale, real-time AI workloads.
Own end-to-end optimization of I/O paths between GPU memory and storage using technologies such as NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage, RDMA, and NVMe-over-Fabrics.
Define and implement multi-tier storage architectures optimized for inference latency, throughput, and scalability.
Lead development of advanced KV cache management strategies, including offloading, prefetching, and persistence across distributed storage layers.
Partner with AI/ML engineering teams to optimize inference performance in frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Establish benchmarking frameworks and lead performance tuning efforts for storage and data movement in production inference environments.
Diagnose and resolve complex system bottlenecks across storage, networking, and GPU subsystems.
Influence architecture decisions for distributed inference systems, ensuring scalability, resilience, and efficient data locality.
Drive engineering excellence through best practices in observability, performance monitoring, automation, and reliability engineering.
Mentor junior engineers and provide technical leadership across cross-functional teams.
Requirements
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
12+ years of experience in storage systems, distributed systems, or performance engineering.
Proven track record of architecting and delivering large-scale, high-performance infrastructure systems.
Deep expertise in distributed storage architectures including object storage, scalable file systems, or cloud-native storage platforms.
Strong understanding of Linux I/O stack, filesystem internals, and storage protocols.
Extensive hands-on experience with NVMe, SSD optimization, and high-performance storage environments.
Strong experience with RDMA, InfiniBand, or other high-speed data transfer technologies.
Solid understanding of GPU computing concepts and CPU–GPU data movement patterns.
Proficiency in Python and/or C/C++, with advanced debugging, profiling, and performance tuning skills.
Demonstrated ability to optimize latency-sensitive, high-throughput production systems.
Nice to Have
Hands-on experience with NVIDIA NIXL or similar data movement frameworks.
Experience with GPU-aware storage pipelines and GPUDirect Storage.
Strong understanding of AI inference systems, LLM serving architectures, and KV cache optimization.
Experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines and open vector search ecosystems.
Background in high-performance computing or hyperscale distributed environments.
Expertise in caching strategies, memory tiering, and data locality optimization.
Experience designing disaggregated compute and storage architectures.
Skills and Tools
Python
PyTorch
TensorFlow
C++
LLM
RAG
NVIDIA NIXL
Infinia Data Intelligence Platform
NVMe-over-Fabrics
RDMA
InfiniBand
GPUDirect Storage
About the Company
DDN specializes in advanced data storage and management solutions, delivering high-performance platforms designed to handle massive data workloads and modern AI infrastructure requirements.
How to Apply
To apply for this position, please visit the official DDN careers page and submit your application online.
