Staff Software Engineer, Storage Platform

About the Team: 

The Interplanetary Sciences Program was established to expand access to scientific exploration across our solar system. Its mission is to make planetary research faster, more affordable, and more capable than ever before by rethinking how science missions are designed, built, and operated. The program aims to enable scientists to send instruments to distant worlds without decades of development or prohibitive costs. By creating a sustainable model for interplanetary exploration, we are transforming space science from an occasional event into a continuous process of discovery that accelerates knowledge, broadens participation, and inspires the next generation of explorers.

About the Role:

• Own the complete storage platform software stack for a space-based data center: custom Linux kernel drivers, OpenZFS pool design, NFS data serving, and automated fault recovery, shipping a platform that preserves up to a petabyte of mission data through years of radiation exposure
• Design and implement custom Linux kernel drivers for NVMe fault recovery and GPIO overcurrent protection, working across PCI/PCIe, block layer, and interrupt subsystems to detect and recover from radiation-induced upsets without data loss
• Lead the ZFS pool topology architectural decisions by building quantitative reliability models that balance upset probability, resilver risk, and capacity over a 6+ year mission, then validate through fault injection testing
• Develop the integration layer between NVMe controller reset and ZFS, ensuring that a drive recovering from a transient fault re-enters the storage pool cleanly, bridging driver-level recovery with filesystem-level fault tolerance
• Rapidly prototype on commodity hardware, from first boot through sustained 10 Gbps writes with automated fault recovery, de-risking the architecture before committing to the target platform, then carry the design through integration and launch 

About You:

• 5+ years writing Linux kernel code, actual driver development involving PCI/PCIe devices, block storage, or interrupt-driven hardware, with meaningful time spent in kernel space 
• Experience with storage systems: ZFS or other copy-on-write filesystems, RAID, NVMe internals, or high-throughput network storage (e.g., NFS) 
• Depth in one or more: filesystem internals, block layer / device management, or storage protocol implementation 
• Strong working knowledge of OS internals: virtual memory, interrupt context constraints, synchronization primitives, and I/O stack behavior

Nice to haves but not required:  

• Hands-on experience at the driver hardware software boundary: DMA coherency, MMIO semantics, PCIe enumeration, and cache behavior  
• Strong working knowledge of data structures and systems reasoning for storage (Merkle trees, NVMe submission/completion queue ring buffers, hash tables, radix trees) 
• Experience testing storage systems, including fault injection (PCIe/NVMe resets, error storms), low-level tracing (ftrace/perf/bpftrace), and crash dump analysis (kdump/vmcore) 
• Experience designing software recovery around storage hardware fault cases, whether that's storage firmware, autonomous vehicle data systems, large-scale distributed infrastructure, or embedded platforms 
• Familiarity with embedded Linux build systems (Yocto or Buildroot) and cross-compilation
• Hardware lab comfort: serial consoles, logic analyzers, and willingness to debug PCIe enumeration failures on a prototype board alongside the electrical engineers