About the role
About the Role
The Data Infrastructure team designs, deploys, and operates the large-scale open-source data systems that underpin Backblaze's products. We run some of the largest clusters of their kind globally, and at that scale the cost of a poorly designed or misconfigured system is measured in millions of dollars of hardware and direct impact on product reliability.
This role sits at the intersection of infrastructure engineering and application design. The work is not purely operational – it requires a deep understanding of how each system behaves under load, how application usage patterns interact with infrastructure decisions, and how to configure and evolve these systems to remain performant and cost-effective as the business grows. Engineers in this team work closely with application teams to ensure that both the infrastructure and the applications built on top of it are designed to perform well together.
The breadth of systems in scope means the nature of problems varies considerably. Engineers in this team are expected to be as comfortable reasoning about a new system being deployed for the first time as they are optimising one that has been in production for years.
What You'll Do
- Design, configure, and maintain large-scale data solutions including distributed databases, eventing systems, and in-memory caches
- Work closely with Operations and Application Engineers to develop new solutions and optimise existing ones, ensuring infrastructure design and application usage patterns are well aligned
- Improve production system scalability, performance, and availability across a diverse portfolio of open-source data systems
- Deliver enhancements to observability, operability, and reliability in order to reduce total cost of ownership
- Take ownership of cost efficiency at scale, with an understanding that hardware and infrastructure decisions at this size carry significant financial consequence
