Staff Engineer AI Development

This is an incredible opportunity to be part of a company that has been at the forefront of AI and high-performance data storage innovation for over two decades. DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a global market leader renowned for powering many of the worlds most demanding AI data centers in industries ranging from life sciences and healthcare to financial services autonomous cars Government academia research and manufacturing.

DDNs A3I solutions are transforming the landscape of AI infrastructure. IDC

The real differentiator is DDN. I never hesitate to recommend DDN. DDN is the de facto name for AI Storage in high performance environments - Marc Hamilton VP Solutions Architecture & Engineering NVIDIA

DDN is the global leader in AI and multi-cloud data management at scale. Our cutting-edge data intelligence platform is designed to accelerate AI workloads enabling organizations to extract maximum value from their data. With a proven track record of performance reliability and scalability DDN empowers businesses to tackle the most challenging AI and data-intensive workloads with confidence.

Our success is driven by our unwavering commitment to innovation customer-centricity and a team of passionate professionals who bring their expertise and dedication to every project. This is a chance to make a significant impact at a company that is shaping the future of AI and data management.

Our commitment to innovation customer success and market leadership makes this an exciting and rewarding role for a driven professional looking to make a lasting impact in the world of AI and data storage.

DDN is seeking a highly experienced Staff Engineer specializing in AI Data Path & Storage to lead hands-on development and integration of advanced storage systems with next-generation AI inference pipelines. This role involves coding prototyping and rapidly iterating on solutions in close collaboration with architects to design and deliver high-performance data movement architectures. You will leverage NVIDIAs NIXL (Inference Transfer Library) alongside the Infinia Data Intelligence Platform to enable ultra-low-latency high-throughput data movement across GPU memory and distributed storage layers including workloads involving KV cache management and vector database retrieval. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in distributed storage GPU data paths and large-scale system optimization with a proven track record of building and shipping production-grade AI infrastructure.

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 (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.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering or a related field.
• 10 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.
• Strong experience with RDMA InfiniBand or other high-speed data transfer technologies.
• Solid understanding of GPU computing concepts and CPUGPU 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 Skills

• 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.

What Youll Work On

• Leading the evolution of storage systems into GPU-native data layers for AI inference
• Building next-generation distributed AI infrastructure using NIXL and Infinia
• Driving performance breakthroughs in real-time LLM inference at scale
• Designing storage architectures for large-scale AI datasets and retrieval systems

DataDirect Networks Inc. is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion gender gender identity gender expression transgender sex stereotyping sexual orientation national origin disability protected Veteran Status or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal state or local law.