Sr. Staff Engineer, Lustre

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop and debug LustreFS features, fixes and enhancements across relevant subsystems such as llite, MDS/MDT, OSS/OST, LDLM and LNet.
• Investigate customer and scale-related defects, drive root-cause analysis and implement high-quality fixes with strong attention to correctness and maintainability.
• Contribute to performance tuning, failure analysis and reliability improvements for large-scale Lustre deployments.
• Participate actively in code reviews, design reviews and subsystem discussions, bringing rigor to testing and operational readiness.
• Work closely with QE and support to reproduce issues, improve diagnostic data quality and increase coverage for high-risk failure scenarios.
• Help document subsystem behavior, debugging approaches, known failure patterns and operational best practices.
• Use AI-assisted tools where appropriate to speed up issue triage, summarize logs, improve code understanding and capture reusable lessons learned.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in systems software, distributed systems, storage, Linux kernel or filesystem engineering.
• Strong experience in LustreFS development, support or performance engineering with depth in at least one major subsystem.
• Strong C programming and Linux systems debugging skills.
• Working knowledge of Linux kernel internals, filesystem semantics, networking and performance analysis.
• Experience with LNet and/or high-performance transports such as RDMA, InfiniBand, RoCE or TCP-based storage networking.
• Ability to debug and resolve issues spanning multiple layers including client, server, network and backend storage.
• Strong collaboration skills and the ability to work across functions in a fast-moving engineering environment.

Preferred Skills

• Experience in HPC, AI infrastructure or large-scale parallel storage environments.
• Exposure to metadata-heavy and throughput-heavy workload characterization and tuning.
• Familiarity with ZFS, ldiskfs, NVMe-backed storage and related observability / performance tooling.
• Experience creating test plans, reproducer frameworks, runbooks or diagnostic automation.
• Comfort using AI tools to accelerate debugging, code reviews, triage, documentation and early-stage design ideation.
• Experience mentoring junior engineers or leading focused technical efforts within a subsystem.
• What You Will Work On
• Hands-on development and debugging of LustreFS defects, performance issues and subsystem enhancements.
• Customer-facing and scale-related issue investigation across llite, metadata, object storage, LNet and transport layers.
• Collaborative design and implementation of reliability, observability and serviceability improvements.
• Reviewing and validating fixes through targeted tests, failure injection, log analysis and performance characterization.
• Using AI-assisted workflows to accelerate triage, debug loops, code understanding and documentation quality.
• Contributing to team redundancy by strengthening documentation, code review quality and subsystem knowledge sharing.
• Why This Role Matters
• This role is central to building durable engineering redundancy in LustreFS: expanding deep subsystem ownership, reducing concentration risk, and accelerating next-generation delivery through strong engineering fundamentals and AI-enabled execution.

What You Will Work On

Why This Role Matters