Member of Technical Staff - Storage
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 12h ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
RAG Engineer
About the job
AI needs a new infrastructure layer, and we're building it at Modal. We are seeking strong engineers to design, build, and maintain the novel, high-performance systems that power our serverless platform. Specifically, you will focus on the distributed object storage system that handles hundreds of petabytes of data, replicated across multiple cloud object stores and a CDN, cached on local NVMe, and shared peer-to-peer. Your work will involve making cold starts feel local by designing caching, preloading, and peer-to-peer layers to mask object-store latency. You will also be responsible for durability and cost at petabyte scale, managing replication, garbage collection, and working across the stack from local disk to distributed blob storage.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain the distributed object storage system.
- Improve cold start performance by designing caching, preloading, and peer-to-peer layers.
- Ensure durability and cost-efficiency at petabyte scale.
- Manage streaming and batch replication between origins.
- Oversee garbage collection over billions of objects.
- Work across the full stack, from local disk and page cache to distributed blob storage.
- Contribute to the evolution of storage systems by pushing storage closer to workloads.
- Participate in the on-call rotation and respond to production incidents.
Requirements
- 5+ years of experience writing high-quality production code.
- Experience building high-performance distributed storage or caching systems at a large scale.
- Strong cloud skills, including deep familiarity with object storage (S3 or similar), CDNs, and their consistency, throughput, and cost characteristics.
- Strong knowledge of low-level operating system foundations (Linux kernel, file systems, page cache, containers, etc.).