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Senior Staff Engineer - AI Data Path

DDN

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 (NVMe, SSD, object storage) 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.
  • Leading the evolution of storage systems into GPU-native data layers for AI inference
  • Building next-generation distributed AI infrastructure using NIXL and Infinia
  • Designing storage architectures for large-scale AI datasets and retrieval systems

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 (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.
  • 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.

Preferred

  • 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 (HPC) or hyperscale distributed environments.
  • Expertise in caching strategies, memory tiering, and data locality optimization.
  • Experience designing disaggregated compute and storage architectures.

Required Qualifications

Strong experience with RDMA, InfiniBand, or other high-speed data transfer technologies.

What You’ll Work On

Driving performance breakthroughs in real-time LLM inference at scale