Sr. Staff Engineer - Data Path

The Sr. Staff Engineer - Data Path is a senior individual contributor responsible for designing, developing, and optimizing performance-critical data path components within a distributed storage and data services platform. This role focuses on the efficient movement of data through complex software systems, with an emphasis on scalability, reliability, and low-latency performance.

As a technical leader within the Infinia Engineering group, this engineer operates with broad architectural influence, partners closely with cross-functional teams, and drives best practices across the data path stack while remaining hands-on in design and implementation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

DATA PATH ARCHITECTURE & DEVELOPMENT

- Design, implement, and optimize core data path components in large-scale, distributed systems.

- Contribute to system architecture decisions affecting performance, throughput, latency, and resource utilization.

- Develop high-quality, maintainable code for performance-critical paths, primarily in systems-level languages (e.g., C/C++).

PERFORMANCE & SCALABILITY

- Analyze and optimize data movement across CPU, memory, storage, and network layers.

- Identify performance bottlenecks and drive solutions through profiling, benchmarking, and tuning.

- Establish performance baselines and contribute to regression detection and prevention strategies.

TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP

- Act as a technical authority within the data path domain, influencing designs across teams.

- Lead design reviews and provide guidance on complex technical challenges.

- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers on systems design, performance engineering, and best practices.

CROSS-FUNCTIONAL COLLABORATION

- Work closely with adjacent engineering teams, including platform, infrastructure, and quality engineering.

- Partner with Product Management to ensure technical feasibility and performance considerations are reflected in roadmap planning.

- Support downstream teams (e.g., solutions, customer engineering) as a subject matter expert when needed.

QUALITY & OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE

- Promote best practices in code quality, testing, observability, and documentation.

- Participate in incident analysis and resolution related to data path behavior in production environments.

- Contribute to long-term technical strategy and continuous improvement initiatives.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience).

- 12+ years of experience in systems software, distributed systems, or infrastructure engineering.

- Strong experience designing and implementing performance-critical software components.

- Proficiency in C/C++ or similar systems programming languages.

- Solid understanding of operating systems fundamentals, concurrency, memory management, and networking concepts.

- Proven ability to work independently on complex technical problems and influence system-level outcomes.