Principal Storage Architect - Milpitas, California, United States
Originally posted 7 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
This role defines the high-performance storage architecture for Graphcore's AI computing and data center infrastructures. You will lead the design of local and distributed storage tiers for large-scale training and inference.
What you'll do
- Define the end-to-end architecture and technology roadmap for local, disaggregated, and distributed storage across Graphcore AI server and data center platforms.
- Design storage topologies that optimize PCIe lane allocation, network-domain placement, and data paths among CPUs, AI accelerators, memory, and storage systems.
- Lead the architecture of storage control-plane and data-plane solutions, evaluating commercial and open technologies.
- Profile and tune the Linux storage stack, block layer, I/O schedulers, direct I/O paths, file systems, and drivers.
- Optimize storage for AI workloads, including model checkpointing, key-value cache offload, data ingestion, and direct data movement between NVMe storage and accelerator memory.
- Set the technical direction for NVMe SSD lifecycle management, including qualification, provisioning, health monitoring, firmware rollout, and failure handling.
What you'll need
- Extensive hands-on experience in storage engineering and architecture for AI, high-performance computing, hyperscale, or large data center environments, including technical leadership at Principal, Staff, or Lead Architect scope.
- Deep knowledge of NVMe, PCIe Gen5 or Gen6 architecture, NAND flash behavior, SSD form factors, endurance, firmware, and device lifecycle management.
- Deep operational knowledge of Linux storage internals, including the block layer, I/O schedulers, direct I/O, kernel and driver behavior, and file systems such as XFS, ext4, or ZFS.
- Hands-on experience with storage benchmarking and profiling tools such as fio, blktrace, iostat, and perf.
- Programming and automation skills in Python and Bash, with experience using structured data formats and REST APIs.
- Demonstrated ability to diagnose complex hardware and software interactions, including kernel failures, PCIe errors, network issues, performance regressions, and SSD firmware defects.
Nice to have
- Experience implementing, testing, or troubleshooting GPU Direct Storage or comparable direct accelerator-to-storage technologies.
- Experience designing or operating NVMe over Fabrics deployments using RoCEv2 or TCP.
- Experience with the Storage Performance Development Kit or other user-space storage frameworks.
- Familiarity with high-performance parallel and distributed file systems such as Weka, VAST Data, Lustre, DAOS, or DDN.
- Knowledge of Compute Express Link and its implications for future memory and storage tiering in AI servers.
Skills: NVMe, PCIe, Linux storage stack, AI accelerators, data center
This role has been open 1 day — well below the 42-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Storage Systems
|
Open roles in category
30
|
Median days open
42 d
|
Median salary
$245k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Graphcore | All employers we track in this specialty (30 roles · 11 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 1 | 30 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 88 | 6049 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 1 d | 42 d (−41 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $245k |
Skills observed across this category: NVMe, PCIe, Linux storage stack, AI accelerators, data center
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 20 open roles · median 41 d
- Broadcom · 1 open role · median 141 d
- Graphcore (this employer) · 1 open role · median 1 d
- KLA Corporation · 1 open role · median 174 d
- Marvell Technology · 1 open role · median 5 d
- Qualcomm · 1 open role · median 45 d
How we counted: 30 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Storage Systems) roles from 11 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 9 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.