Sr/Staff Lustre Engineer

If you’ve spent years deep in the Lustre codebase — not just administering Lustre systems, but actually designing, building, optimizing, and upstreaming features — this is a chance to work on one of the most demanding storage engineering problems in the market.

We’re looking for a hands-on Lustre Engineer to help shape the next generation of high-performance, enterprise-ready Lustre capabilities. This role is for someone who is equally comfortable working in kernel-space C, analyzing performance bottlenecks in large-scale deployments, and collaborating with other senior engineers to evolve Lustre architecture for modern infrastructure.

• →Contribute to Lustre architecture and lead implementation of new features across core subsystems including MDS/OSS, LDLM, DNE, DoM, FLD, layout, snapshot, quota, security, and recovery
• →Write high-performance, production-grade code across the Lustre kernel module, user-space utilities, and supporting libraries
• →Own the full development lifecycle for major features, from design and coding through testing, performance tuning, and upstream patch submission
• →Improve scalability for multi-petabyte Lustre environments, including metadata performance, I/O path optimization, and integration with modern interconnects and storage fabrics
• →Modernize Lustre internals through kernel API updates, locking improvements, RDMA enhancements, and cloud/container-oriented capabilities
• →Prototype and evaluate emerging technologies such as NVMe-oF, CXL, and other next-generation storage approaches for potential Lustre integration
• →Strengthen regression, stress, and performance validation using tools such as IOR, mdtest, fio, and custom Lustre test tooling
• →Perform deep code-level performance analysis using Lustre tracing tools, perf, lockstat, and kernel profilers
• →Work closely with Principal Engineers, hardware teams, and application owners to translate real workload needs into practical Lustre improvements
• →Mentor other developers and contribute design docs, technical guides, and engineering reviews

• 7+ years of progressive, hands-on Lustre software development experience
• A strong track record of meaningful contributions to the Lustre codebase in production or open-source environments
• Demonstrated success designing, implementing, and upstreaming Lustre features that made it into major releases
• Deep understanding of Lustre internals, including MDS/OSS architecture, LDLM locking and recovery, journaling, DNE, DoM, FLD, layout, quota, and security
• Expert-level C programming and strong Linux kernel development experience
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, parallel file systems, and high-performance I/O
• Experience with Lustre build, development, and debugging tooling such as lctl, llstat, strace, perf, and kernel tracers
• Python and/or Bash skills for tooling and automation
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• Clear written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts effectively

• 7+ years in HPC or storage software development
• Visible contributions to the Lustre open-source community, including accepted patches, LUG participation, or public technical talks
• Experience running or developing Lustre in cloud environments such as AWS FSx for Lustre, Azure Lustre, or custom cloud deployments
• Familiarity with adjacent systems such as Ceph, DAOS, BeeGFS, WekaIO, or GPFS
• Exposure to RDMA, NVMe-oF, CXL, computational storage, or AI/ML I/O workloads
• Conference presentations, technical publications, or other public engineering contributions

• Have built inside Lustre itself, not just around it
• Enjoy solving hard kernel, performance, and distributed systems problems
• Care about code quality, upstream contribution, and long-term architectural impact
• Want to work on infrastructure that operates at real scale under real performance constraints

• Have mainly supported or administered Lustre rather than developed it
• Come from general storage or kernel backgrounds without clear Lustre code contribution history
• Prefer high-level application engineering over low-level systems and kernel work

Salary Range: $150,000 - $250,000

This is a rare opportunity to work on deeply technical, high-impact storage engineering problems in a domain where performance, scale, reliability, and upstream credibility all matter. If you want to influence the future of Lustre in production-grade environments, this is the kind of role where your work can genuinely shape the platform.

If you’ve made meaningful contributions to Lustre and want to work on large-scale filesystem innovation, we’d love to hear from you.

If you want, I can also turn this into:

• a shorter LinkedIn-style advert
• a more formal JD
• or a recruiter outreach version for direct messaging.

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