HPC Storage Engineer - West Coast

Runpod is the AI Developer Cloud. More than one million developers, from indie researchers to teams running frontier models in production, use Runpod to experiment, train, fine-tune, deploy, and scale AI on one platform. The platform has processed more than 20 billion inference requests. We closed a $100M Series A in June 2026. We're at an inflection point for AI infrastructure, and we're building the platform the next generation of developers will depend on. We're a small, remote-first team. We take ownership seriously, move fast, and ship work that more than a million developers rely on every day. We're looking for people who care deeply, build with urgency, and want to matter at scale. Learn more in our CEO's funding announcement: https://www.runpod.io/blog/one-million-developers . You will be part of the Infrastructure organization, specifically within the team managing Runpod's multi-region storage ecosystem. Including network volumes, local NVMe, and S3-compatible object storage. At Runpod, storage is a critical, high-impact resource; it determines cold start velocity, training job data streaming efficiency, and the reliable persistence of model weights and checkpoints. This senior, hands-on group operates in tight coordination with SRE, networking, and supply chain teams, as well as our global hardware partners. We eliminate the divide between architectural design and operational execution. The engineers who define our systems also write the code, optimize the fabric, manage on-call rotations, and lead capacity planning. We are a remote-first and Slack-native team that prioritizes rapid delivery and empowers engineers to own complete outcomes instead of just closing tickets. We're hiring a Senior Storage Engineer to contribute to the design, scaling, and reliability of Runpod's storage platform. This is a hands-on engineering role, not just an administration role. You'll be implementing and maintaining distributed storage deployments, writing the code and automation that operates them. You will help write what Runpod's storage story looks like for the next several years. Helping to decide which distributed storage systems we bet on, how we tier and place data, how we tune the network paths storage depends on, and what we buy and deploy at petabyte scale. You'll have real latitude to innovate, replacing manual operations with automation, designing the metrics and SLOs the fleet is judged by, and leading capacity expansions and migrations end to end. Because storage sits directly under our customers' training, fine-tuning, and inference workloads, improvements you make show up immediately as faster cold starts, faster jobs, and fewer incidents for more than a million developers.

Responsibilities:

Own capacity, durability, availability, and performance characteristics of network volumes, local NVMe, and S3-compatible object storage. Tune the full I/O path: device and filesystem configuration, caching and read-ahead strategies, replication and erasure coding trade-offs, and client-side mount behavior. Diagnose hard performance problems end to end Lead capacity expansions, hardware refreshes, migrations, and rebalances without customer-visible disruption. Work with Runpod and partner networking teams to design and tune the network paths storage depends on: high-throughput east-west fabric, MTU and jumbo frames, congestion and flow control, multipath, and NIC/offload configuration. Understand and optimize RDMA/RoCE and high-speed IB/Ethernet fabrics as they apply to storage traffic. Work closely with network engineering on topology decisions, oversubscription ratios, and cross-region data movement. Write production code (Go, Python, or similar) for storage control-plane services, provisioning workflows, data movement pipelines, and monitoring Build against and extend APIs: our own control plane, S3-compatible interfaces, CSI drivers, Kubernetes APIs, vendor and cloud provider APIs. Automate the operations you'd otherwise do by hand. Manual runbooks are a starting point, not a destination. Treat infrastructure as code and participate fully in code review, testing, and CI. Instrument the storage fleet so its behavior is legible: IOPS, throughput, latency, error and retry rates, capacity utilization, and per-tenant consumption. Build dashboards, SLOs, and alerts that catch degradation before customers do. Participate in an on-call rotation for storage systems and drive blameless post-incident follow-through.