Hiring Storage Engineers: The Complete Guide

# Storage Engineer

**Location:** Seattle, WA (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Mid-Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is a data platform storing 20+ petabytes of customer data with 11 nines durability. Our storage layer is the foundation that everything else depends on—query engines, analytics, and ML all rely on data being there when needed.

We process 500,000+ write requests per second and serve 2 million read requests per second. Storage performance directly impacts customer experience, and data loss would be catastrophic.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Work on storage at serious scale—20PB, 500K writes/sec
- Solve hard distributed systems problems (consensus, replication, recovery)
- Infrastructure that really matters—data durability is non-negotiable
- Join a 10-person storage team within a 200-person engineering org
- Series D company, strong enterprise traction
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity

## The Role

We're looking for a Storage Engineer to help us build and scale our distributed storage infrastructure. You'll work on replication, consistency, durability, and the performance optimization that keeps our storage fast and reliable.

This is core systems engineering. You'll think about failure modes—what happens when disks fail, nodes go down, networks partition. You'll implement consensus protocols, manage replication lag, and ensure data survives everything except total datacenter destruction.

The ideal candidate has deep distributed systems experience and understands storage fundamentals: CAP theorem, consistency models, replication strategies. You're the kind of engineer who reads papers about Dynamo and Spanner for fun.

## What You'll Work On

### First 30 Days
- Onboard to our storage architecture, replication, and durability systems
- Understand our failure modes, recovery procedures, and monitoring
- Ship your first improvement (performance, reliability, or tooling)

### First 90 Days
- Own a storage system component (replication, compaction, or serving)
- Contribute to durability or performance improvements
- Participate in on-call and incident response
- Build relationships with database and infrastructure teams

### First Year
- Lead storage initiatives with measurable reliability or performance impact
- Architect improvements to our storage infrastructure
- Develop new capabilities (new consistency models, storage tiers)
- Mentor teammates on storage engineering best practices

## Objectives of This Role

- Maintain 11 nines durability with documented verification
- Improve storage read and write latency
- Scale storage to handle 2x data growth
- Reduce recovery time from failure scenarios
- Build tooling that helps operators manage storage safely

## Responsibilities

**Distributed Storage (50%)**
- Build and improve distributed storage systems
- Implement replication and consensus protocols
- Design for durability across failure scenarios
- Handle consistency and availability tradeoffs
- Manage storage cluster operations at scale

**Performance & Optimization (30%)**
- Optimize read and write performance
- Implement storage tiering and caching
- Tune storage engine parameters (LSM, compaction)
- Profile and optimize hot paths
- Balance resource utilization across clusters

**Reliability & Operations (20%)**
- Build monitoring and alerting for storage health
- Design and test recovery procedures
- Handle storage incidents and data recovery
- Create tooling for safe operations
- Document storage architecture and runbooks

## Required Skills and Qualifications

**Technical Skills**
- 5+ years of systems engineering experience
- 3+ years in storage, database internals, or distributed systems
- Deep understanding of distributed systems theory (CAP, PACELC, consensus)
- Experience with storage internals (LSM trees, B-trees, WAL)
- Performance optimization experience at systems level
- Proficiency in Rust, Go, C++, or similar systems languages

**Storage Knowledge**
- Understanding of replication strategies and consistency models
- Experience with failure handling and recovery
- Familiarity with durability guarantees and verification

**Soft Skills**
- Reliability-first mindset—data loss is unacceptable
- Clear communication about complex systems
- Collaboration with database and infrastructure teams

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Database storage engine experience (RocksDB, WiredTiger)
- Cloud storage experience (S3, GCS, Azure Blob)
- Experience building or operating petabyte-scale systems
- Background in distributed consensus (Raft, Paxos)
- Publications or contributions to storage systems
- Formal verification or correctness background

## Tech Stack

**Storage:** Custom distributed storage, RocksDB storage engine

**Languages:** Rust for performance-critical paths, Go for services

**Consensus:** Raft-based replication, custom coordination

**Infrastructure:** Kubernetes, AWS (EBS, S3 for backup), bare metal

**Monitoring:** Prometheus, Grafana, custom storage dashboards

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $155,000 - $210,000 (based on experience)

**Equity:** 0.05% - 0.15% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

*Health & Wellness*
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered)
- $100/month wellness stipend
- Mental health support through Lyra

*Time Off*
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- 11 paid company holidays
- 16 weeks paid parental leave

*Professional Development*
- $3,000 annual learning budget
- Conference attendance (FAST, OSDI, SOSP)
- Internal storage and systems tech talks

*Financial*
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- Equity refresh grants annually

*Workspace*
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- Hybrid work (2-3 days in Seattle office)
- High-performance development machines

## Engineering Culture

**How we work:**
- Durability obsession—data loss is never acceptable
- Rigorous testing including failure injection
- Formal design reviews for storage changes
- Regular disaster recovery testing
- Blameless post-mortems with focus on systems

**What we value:**
- Reliability over features
- Understanding failure modes before they happen
- Clear documentation of storage guarantees
- Operational excellence and safe changes
- Work-life balance (on-call is well-supported)

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2 weeks.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min)
  Background discussion and role overview.

- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min)
  Distributed systems and storage fundamentals.

- **Step 3: Storage Deep Dive** (90 min)
  Technical discussion about storage systems, replication, and your experience.

- **Step 4: System Design** (90 min)
  Design a distributed storage system component.

- **Step 5: Coding Exercise** (75 min)
  Systems-level coding exercise.

- **Step 6: Team Interviews** (2 x 30 min)
  Meet potential teammates.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer.*