Principle Systems and Performance QA 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. 

As a Senior or Principle Systems and Performance Engineer, you will play a key role in designing, analyzing, and optimizing the performance, scalability, and reliability of Quantum’s primary storage and data management platforms. You will work across hardware, software, and infrastructure layers to ensure our systems meet demanding performance, availability, and scalability requirements. This role blends deep technical expertise with cross-functional collaboration. You will drive performance characterization efforts, build and evolve benchmarking and analysis tools, and influence system architecture to deliver predictable, high-performance solutions for complex, distributed storage environments.

Key Responsibilities:

Systems & Performance Engineering

• Design, execute, and analyze performance, scalability, and stress testing for storage systems and distributed services.
• Characterize system behavior under real-world workloads, identifying bottlenecks across software, OS, network, and hardware layers.
• Develop performance models, baselines, and KPIs to guide architecture, capacity planning, and release readiness decisions.

Benchmarking, Tooling & Automation

• Build, extend, and maintain performance test frameworks and tooling, primarily in Linux environments.
• Leverage and integrate industry-standard benchmarking tools (e.g., IO, throughput, latency, resiliency) alongside custom workloads.
• Automate test execution, data collection, and result analysis to enable repeatable and scalable performance validation.

Architecture & Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with Software Engineering, Platform OS, Hardware, QA, and Product teams to influence system design for performance and scalability.
• Provide data-driven insights and recommendations during design reviews, feature planning, and release evaluations.
• Collaborate with field, solution engineering, and customer-facing teams to reproduce, analyze, and resolve performance issues.

Execution & Quality Ownership

• Lead root cause analysis for performance regressions and system-level issues, driving resolution across teams.
• Own performance sign-off criteria for features and releases, ensuring customer workloads are met or exceeded.
• Maintain deep product knowledge to design meaningful workloads and interpret system behavior accurately.

Qualifications:

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of experience in systems engineering, performance engineering, or software engineering with strong systems focus.
• Strong proficiency in Linux systems internals, performance analysis, and troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience with complex distributed systems, storage technologies (NAS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel), or data-intensive platforms.
• Strong scripting and programming skills (Python required; C/C++, Shell, or similar languages a plus).
• Experience working with CI/CD pipelines, virtualization, and cloud or VM-based environments.
• Willing and able to come to our Mendota Heights, MN or Centennial, CO office during core hours (Tuesday - Thursday 10am - 4pm)

Preferred

• Experience with performance and IO benchmarking tools (e.g., FIO, ElBencho, SPEC, IO500).
• Familiarity with file systems, networking stacks, and storage protocols.
• Experience with large-scale or high-availability systems, clusters, or scale-out architectures.
• Exposure to Agile development practices and tools such as Jira and Confluence.

Soft Skills

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail.
• Ability to communicate complex performance findings clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Proactive collaborator who can influence design and prioritization through data and insight.
• Comfortable operating in fast-paced environments with evolving priorities.

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: $155,000 - $180,000

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.