Senior Staff Software Engineer

DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a global market leader in AI and high-performance data storage innovation. The Senior Staff Software Engineer will lead the Access Control Domain, driving architectural continuity and collaborating with security stakeholders to implement best-in-class user access controls.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the Access Control Domain: Act as the primary technical authority for user authentication, authorization, and identity logic within our Software Defined Storage solution
• Drive Architectural Continuity: Partner with senior leadership and domain experts to maintain and evolve our core infrastructure, ensuring a seamless transition of technical responsibilities
• Collaborate with Security Stakeholders: Work alongside our dedicated security team to implement best-in-class user access controls that meet compliance standards without compromising system speed
• Mentor and Document: Set the standard for technical excellence by providing expert code reviews, mentoring mid-level engineers, and creating high-fidelity documentation for our identity systems
• Full-Lifecycle Engineering: Participate in the Scrum model—from initial ideation and prototyping to testing and maintenance—ensuring high regression coverage for sensitive code paths
• Global Support: Contribute to our team on-call rotation, providing high-level expertise to support our global distributed footprint

Requirements:

• 12+ years of backend development experience, with deep proficiency in Go, C++, or Python, specifically within high-scale distributed systems
• Specialized Expertise in Access Control: In-depth knowledge of RBAC, ABAC, and Multi-Tenancy models within containerized or orchestrated environments
• Identity & Infrastructure Security: Practical experience with TLS/mTLS, PKI management, certificate lifecycles, and identity protocols such as OAuth2/OIDC
• Distributed Systems Foundations: Working knowledge of Consul, etcd, or other key/value stores used for service discovery and maintaining global cluster state
• Technical Diplomacy: The ability to bridge the gap between high-level security mandates and the practical performance requirements of a storage control plane
• Global Collaboration: Proven results working with geographically distributed teams, utilizing asynchronous communication (RFCs, design docs) to drive alignment
• Systemic Domain Ownership: A history of taking full responsibility for a mission-critical domain, ensuring its long-term health, documentation, and scalability
• Experience Building Control Planes: Proven success in developing API servers, controllers, or management layers for storage or compute resources
• Knowledge Synthesis: A track record of collaborating with long-tenured experts to institutionalize tribal knowledge and turn it into robust, documented system architecture
• Observability & Hardening: Experience using Prometheus and OpenTelemetry to ensure that identity and control services are visible, performant, and resilient
• Design Thinking for Infrastructure: The ability to simplify complex user access challenges into elegant, developer-friendly CLI and API experiences