Distinguished Engineer, Storage – AI Cloud - CA, Santa Clara, United States
Originally posted 4 August 2026 by the employer.
About the role
NVIDIA is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to direct storage architecture and technical strategy for AI Cloud across the Neocloud Provider (NCP) and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) ecosystem. You will lead the design and hands-on qualification of high-performance parallel file systems, object stores, and block storage operating at exabyte scale to support large-scale GPU workloads.
What you'll do
- Direct the multi-year technical roadmap, reference architecture, and qualification methodology for parallel file, object, and block storage across NCPs. - Serve as hands-on chief storage architect, leading build reviews, prototyping reference implementations, and analyzing root causes of complex production issues. - Establish durability, availability, efficiency, and blast-radius containment SLOs that govern AI Cloud storage acceptance and GPU allocation gating. - Coordinate storage architectures across training, inference, site-reliability, networking, and external vendor teams to unify infrastructure standards. - Guide the AI storage open-source roadmap, contributing to upstream communities and establishing formal APIs, SDKs, and protocols. - Design storage architectures for multi-generation GPU deployments, covering disaggregated inference with KV caching, exabyte regional object stores, and cross-datacenter data movement.
What you'll need
- BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience. - 18+ years of practical engineering experience in storage technology, including parallel file systems (Lustre, GPFS / Spectrum Scale, WEKA, VAST, BeeGFS, DAOS), object storage (S3 / Swift-class), and block storage (NVMe-oF, NVMesh-class, iSCSI). - Demonstrated experience architecting and managing exabyte-scale storage platforms for AI training, HPC, video, or data lakes with strict durability, availability, and performance SLOs. - Hands-on engineering proficiency in C, C++, Rust, or Go, alongside Python, with deep experience in Linux kernel storage and networking stacks (block layer, RDMA / RoCE / InfiniBand, NVMe, page cache, VFS, multipath). - Track record of driving multi-year technical strategies, writing and reviewing production code, and directly debugging issues in kernel, storage driver, or protocol implementations.
Skills: AI Cloud Data Storage, parallel file systems, object stores, exabyte scale, storage architecture
This role has been open 163 days — well above the 56-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Storage Systems
|
Open roles in category
33
|
Median days open
56 d
|
Median salary
$220k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | NVIDIA | All employers we track in this specialty (33 roles · 14 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 20 | 33 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 997 | 6277 · 144 employers |
| Median days open | 57 d | 56 d (+1 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $220k |
Skills observed across this category: AI Cloud Data Storage, parallel file systems, object stores, exabyte scale, storage architecture
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA (this employer) · 20 open roles · median 56 d
- Broadcom · 1 open role · median 156 d
- Graphcore · 1 open role · median 16 d
- Intel Corporation · 1 open role · median 1 d
- KIOXIA America · 1 open role · median 10 d
- KLA Corporation · 1 open role · median 189 d
How we counted: 33 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Storage Systems) roles from 14 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 24 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.