Principal Software Engineer - Storage

WHAT YOU'LL DO

As a Principal Software Engineer - Storage, you will help set the technical direction for Radiant's cloud storage offering and lead the design and delivery of the storage services and data capabilities required to run demanding cloud and AI workloads at scale.

You'll work across object, block, and file storage, data lifecycle, performance, resilience, APIs, and platform integrations. You'll partner closely with product, infrastructure, SRE, networking, and security teams, and with customers running the most demanding storage workloads.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on building storage services that are high-performance, reliable, scalable, and easy to consume, through architecture, code, and the standards other teams build on.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

- Set the technical vision and architecture for Radiant's storage services, and lead their design and implementation.

- Design and build storage systems across object, block, and file, including the control plane, the data plane, and integration with existing Radiant services.

- Translate product and customer requirements into robust architectures, APIs, and technical designs, working closely with the Storage Product Manager.

- Own the performance, durability, availability, and consistency characteristics of the storage platform, and define the service levels it can credibly meet.

- Profile, benchmark, and tune throughput, latency, and IOPS for AI training, inference, and other data-intensive workloads.

- Lead integration of storage with compute, Kubernetes (CSI), networking, IAM, observability, and developer tooling.

- Design for failure through replication, snapshots, data protection, failure recovery, and safe upgrades at scale.

- Drive operational excellence with SRE, including capacity planning, observability, incident response, and post-incident improvements.

- Raise the engineering bar across the organisation through mentoring, design and code review, and technical standards.

YOUR PROFILE

- Extensive experience building and operating large-scale distributed storage systems or storage-heavy cloud infrastructure.

- A track record of technical leadership at staff or principal level, including setting direction across multiple teams and delivering complex, high-stakes systems.

- Strong hands-on engineering skills in one or more systems languages such as Go or similar.

- Deep technical expertise across:

- Storage: object, block, and file storage, snapshots, replication, erasure coding, caching, tiering, data lifecycle

- Protocols & interfaces: S3, NFS, SMB, CSI, NVMe/NVMe-oF, RDMA, POSIX semantics, storage APIs

- Infrastructure: Kubernetes, containers, high-performance networking, GPU clusters, cloud platforms

- Reliability: durability, availability, consistency models, consensus, failure recovery, data integrity

- Observability & security: metrics, logging, tracing, IAM, encryption at rest and in transit, auditability

- Hands-on experience with technologies such as WEKA, VAST, DDN, Lustre, Ceph, MinIO, Pure Storage, or similar.

- Understanding of AI and HPC storage patterns, such as large-scale training data pipelines, checkpointing, and high-throughput parallel file systems.

- Able to reason about trade-offs between performance, durability, availability, cost, and operational complexity.

- Excellent written and verbal communication, including clear design documents and explaining complex trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.

- Comfortable working directly with customers on highly technical problems.

WHAT YOU BRING

- Storage domain expertise: Understand how storage architecture affects application and workload performance, down to the hardware.

- Engineering excellence: Write and review code that sets the standard for correctness, performance, and maintainability.

- Architectural judgement: Make sound long-term decisions on systems where data loss is not an op