Principle Software Engineer

We are currently seeking a Principal Software Engineer to help define and build the next generation of our distributed file data platform. This role sits within the File System team, responsible for the core storage architecture powering the cloud-native file platform. You will provide technical leadership across distributed file system architecture, storage protocols, metadata services, data protection, and Kubernetes-based infrastructure. You will influence long-term platform direction while remaining close enough to the technology to solve some of the most complex systems challenges in enterprise storage. This role is ideal for engineers who thrive at the intersection of distributed systems, performance engineering, cloud-native infrastructure, and large-scale storage platforms. This role is not intended for engineers focused primarily on application development, front-end technologies, or isolated feature delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Own architectural decisions spanning multiple subsystems.
• Lead technical strategy for distributed storage and file services.
• Drive platform scalability, resilience, and operational excellence.
• Influence engineering standards across multiple teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and technical leaders.
• Balance long-term architecture investments with near-term delivery goals.
• Define architecture and technical direction for Nasuni's distributed file system platform.
• Lead design and implementation of core storage services including metadata, snapshots, caching, replication, and recovery.
• Drive evolution of NFS, SMB, and S3 access services.
• Establish scalability, performance, and reliability standards across the platform.
• Partner with Platform, Control Plane, Security, and Infrastructure teams on system-wide initiatives.
• Guide architectural reviews and technical decision-making.
• Lead resolution of complex production and performance challenges.
• Improve engineering productivity through automation, observability, and modern development practices.
• Utilise AI-assisted engineering workflows where appropriate to accelerate development, troubleshooting, analysis, documentation, and testing while maintaining accountability for quality and security.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to technical talent development.

Expected Outcomes and Impact:

• Improve platform scalability and resilience for enterprise workloads.
• Influence multi-year architecture decisions across the storage platform.
• Reduce operational complexity through automation and platform improvements.
• Accelerate engineering velocity while maintaining reliability standards.
• Raise technical excellence across the File System organisation.

Requirements:

• 12+ years of software engineering experience focused on systems programming.
• Deep expertise in C and C++.
• Significant experience designing distributed systems at scale.
• Strong understanding of file system internals, POSIX semantics, VFS, metadata services, and storage architectures.
• Experience with Kubernetes-based distributed platforms.
• Experience leading architecture decisions across multiple engineering teams.
• Experience with NFS, SMB, S3, or related storage protocols.
• Proven ownership of large-scale technical initiatives from design through production.

Preferred:

• Experience with cloud-native storage platforms.
• Linux kernel, FUSE, or eBPF experience.
• Consensus systems and distributed coordination.
• High availability architectures.
• Performance engineering and storage benchmarking.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and technical leads.

Ideal:

• Experience building enterprise-scale file systems.
• Contributions to storage, distributed systems, or infrastructure platforms used by large customer environments.
• Experience establishing engineering standards across organisations.
• AI workflow optimisation experience for software development and platform engineering.

Experience Guidelines:

• 10-15+ years total software engineering experience.
• 7+ years in distributed systems, storage, or infrastructure engineering.
• 3+ years leading architecture or technical direction across multiple teams.