Principal Systems Software Engineer

Quantum Corporation leads the world in helping users collaboratively solve some of the world's hardest computer challenges. Whether its wrangling Petabytes of data for cutting edge movie production, managing global content production workflows, exploring new sources of energy, or managing oceans of content and blending collaborative high-speed workflows with cutting-edge object storage, Quantum has the tools and technology to help you engineer the solution that works now - and preserves your work for decades to come. You are applying to an exceptional team that contributes to enhancing our position as a proven global expert in data management.

Job Summary and Duties:

We are seeking a Principal Object Storage Software Engineer with a strong control plane, and distributed systems focus to design, implement, and evolve the metadata, orchestration, and cluster management services of our scale-out object storage platform.

In this role, you will own software that governs request coordination, metadata lifecycles, placement decisions, durability policies, and cluster-wide state, ensuring correctness, scalability, and operability across large deployments.

This is a deep systems role for engineers passionate about distributed correctness, failure handling, and control-plane scalability in large object storage systems.

Key Responsibilities

Control Plane & Distributed Architecture

• Architect and evolve control plane services for object metadata, namespaces, indexing, placement logic, and cluster membership/state management.
• Design scalable coordination mechanisms for request routing, lifecycle management, background services, and policy enforcement across multi-node clusters.
• Define clear control-plane/data-plane boundaries to enable long-term system evolution and operational

Durability, Integrity & Lifecycle Management

• Implement and maintain durability and lifecycle features such as erasure coding policies, replication control, healing workflows, snapshots (where applicable), thin provisioning concepts, and data scrubbing orchestration.
• Ensure system-wide correctness under failures including node loss, disk faults, partial operations, network partitions, and rolling upgrades—without compromising data integrity.
• Drive idempotent, auditable, and recoverable control-plane

Concurrency, Coordination & Correctness

• Solve high-concurrency challenges in metadata and control-plane paths using robust synchronization strategies, lock minimization, and asynchronous execution models.
• Apply careful reasoning around ordering, leader election, state transitions, retries, and race conditions in distributed control flows.
• Establish correctness guarantees that simplify downstream data-path

Scalability & Cluster Operations

• Ensure that control-plane services scale linearly as clusters grow, including rebalancing, reconstruction coordination, and background task scheduling.
• Design systems that minimize customer-visible impact during maintenance, upgrades, and recovery
• Collaborate cross-functionally with data-path, platform, and operations teams to deliver an integrated, operable solution.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of software development experience using C/C++, Rust, or equivalent systems-level
• Strong experience designing and operating distributed control-plane systems for large-scale
• Deep Linux experience, including debugging, profiling, and performance analysis of complex
• Solid understanding of concurrency, synchronization, state machines, and asynchronous programming
• Strong experience using AI-assisted tools or modern data-pipeline
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively across teams and time
• Self-motivated, with a track record of owning complex systems end-to-

Preferred / Nice-to-Have Skills

• Experience with cluster management, consensus, or coordination
• Familiarity with storage architectures and object storage control
• Experience with containers and
• Experience using Git and
• Experience with Amazon AWS S3 APIs, SDKs, and tooling

Quantum provides a diverse portfolio of health plans for medical and prescription, dental, vision, life, disability and supplemental medical insurance options. We also support our team members' efforts to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle through reimbursement and educational programs. Quantum offers a company-matched 401(k) plan to help employees save for retirement in a tax-advantaged way. We also have an Employee Stock Purchase Program for purchasing Quantum stock at a discounted rate. 

Anticipated Annual Salary Range: $190,000 - $220,000

The above pay range represents Quantum's good faith and reasonable estimate of possible compensation at the time of posting. Pay within or outside of the range will be based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, relevant experience, knowledge/education, skills/abilities, internal equity, and budgetary considerations. 

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