Staff Engineer

DDNSanta Clara OfficeDepartment

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Opens the official DDN careers page

Salary

$185K - $275K USD

Job type

Full-time

Posted

10 Sept 2026

Status

Open · checked 7d ago

About this role

DDN is hiring a full-time Staff Engineer for the Infinia Core team based at the Santa Clara office. This hands-on technical position blends distributed-systems engineering with direct customer engagement to support production AI storage environments.

Role Overview

The Staff Engineer acts as a technical authority for DDN's next-generation software-defined storage platform, Infinia. This role centers on managing complex technical escalations, conducting root-cause analysis, leading incident responses, and driving product reliability. Candidates must possess a genuine interest in working directly with customers, communicating with executive audiences, and participating in an on-call rotation for after-hours support.

Key Responsibilities

Own complex customer escalations completely from diagnosis to resolution, mitigation, and root-cause analysis.

Lead live incident responses, cross-functional investigations, and war rooms involving Engineering, QA, and Field teams.

Debug intricate distributed-systems, performance issues, and storage across application, protocol, and system layers.

Reproduce issues reported by customers and translate findings into reliability and product enhancements.

Create troubleshooting guidance, runbooks, and performance-tuning practices.

Collaborate strategically with Sales Engineers, Solutions Architects, and Field CTOs on customer issues.

Leverage automation, observability, and AI to enhance diagnostics, reliability, and mean time to resolution.

Communicate technical concepts clearly to senior stakeholders, engineers, and customers.

Requirements

Extensive background in cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, or enterprise storage with technical leadership experience at the Senior or Staff level.

Comprehensive knowledge of file systems and storage technologies like POSIX, S3, NFS, and storage performance.

Advanced Linux systems expertise, covering kernel-level debugging and troubleshooting.

Proficient programming skills in C++ or Python.

Demonstrated capability to diagnose complicated issues utilizing tools such as perf, tcpdump, and strace.

Enthusiasm for direct customer collaboration and complete ownership of difficult technical problems.

Nice to Have

Background working with scale-out file systems and storage platforms such as Weka, VAST, or DDN.

Practical knowledge of observability platforms including Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, or OpenTelemetry.

Understanding of data integrity mechanisms, replication, and consistency models.

Experience supporting high-performance computing setups, LLM training, or AI/ML workloads.

Utilization of artificial intelligence tools for automated root-cause analysis, log analysis, troubleshooting, or MTTR reduction.

Skills and Tools

Python

C++

LLM

Linux systems and kernel-level troubleshooting

Storage technologies including S3, POSIX, and NFS

Diagnostic tools like strace, tcpdump, and perf

Salary and Benefits

Annual Salary: $185,000 to $275,000 USD per year

Employment Type: Full-Time

About the Company

DDN builds advanced data storage solutions tailored for high-performance computing, accelerated computing, and enterprise environments. The company develops Infinia, a software-defined storage platform engineered from the ground up to support modern AI workloads with sub-millisecond latency, multi-tenancy, and all-flash performance.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should visit the official DDN careers page to submit an application for this position.

Skills and tech stack

Python C++LLM

Questions candidates ask

What is the salary range for the Staff Engineer role at DDN?

The annual salary for this full-time position ranges from $185,000 to $275,000 USD.

Where is this job located?

This position is based at the DDN Santa Clara Office and is not a remote role.

What programming languages are required?

Applicants must have strong coding ability in either Python or C++.

Does this role require on-call duties?

Yes, this position requires participation in an on-call rotation to provide after-hours support when needed.

What is DDN's Infinia platform?

Infinia is DDN's next-generation, software-defined storage platform built specifically for accelerated computing and AI workloads, featuring all-flash performance and sub-millisecond latency.

Ready to apply?

The application is on the official DDN careers page.

Apply on company site