About the role
About the Role
Backblaze's storage platform is the foundation on which our B2 Object Storage and Computer Backup products are built. Reliably storing petabytes of customer data – at low cost and high performance – is the core engineering challenge this team is responsible for.
This is a low-level systems engineering role, working close to the hardware and making architectural decisions that will shape the platform over the next five to ten years. The problems are open-ended: diagnosing platform behaviour at scale rarely involves a clear error to trace. Engineers on this team are expected to form hypotheses, investigate from first principles, and drive problems through to resolution.
We have historically built on off-the-shelf, general-purpose solutions. As we have scaled, we have taken increasing ownership of the stack in order to optimise for our specific use cases. That work is ongoing, and this role sits at the centre of it.
What You'll Do
You will work on our storage platform which supports the B2 Object Storage and Computer Backup products, responsible for reliably storing customer data. You will help improve durability, increase throughput, and drive architectural changes to support the long-term requirements of our service.
More specifically:
- Design and build systems that store and manage data reliably at exabyte scale
- Identify and address performance bottlenecks, with a focus on throughput, latency, and efficient hardware utilisation
- Investigate platform issues from first principles, diagnosing from symptoms where root causes are not immediately apparent
- Contribute to significant architectural changes to support the platform over the next five to ten years, including support for new and emerging storage hardware technologies
- Collaborate closely with the broader engineering team, communicating technical thinking clearly and contributing to a culture of open, constructive discussion
