Senior Software Engineer - Protocols

Description VAST Data is looking for a Senior Software Engineer -Protocols to join our growing team! This is a great opportunity to be part of one of the fastest-growing infrastructure companies in history, an organization that is in the center of the hurricane being created by the revolution in artificial intelligence. "VAST's data management vision is the future of the market."- Forbes VAST Data is the data platform company for the AI era. We are building the enterprise software infrastructure to capture, catalog, refine, enrich, and protect massive datasets and make them available for real-time data analysis and AI training and inference. Designed from the ground up to make AI simple to deploy and manage, VAST takes the cost and complexity out of deploying enterprise and AI infrastructure across data center, edge, and cloud. Our success has been built through intense innovation, a customer-first mentality and a team of fearless VASTronauts who leverage their skills & experiences to make real market impact. This is an opportunity to be a key contributor at a pivotal time in our company’s growth and at a pivotal point in computing history. Requirements At VAST Data, senior engineers on the S3 team write code that matters. The kind of code that helps close major customer deals. The kind of code that gets pushed hard by real production workloads. The kind of code that has to be correct when systems are under pressure, clients retry, nodes fail, and performance still matters. You will work on the S3 protocol on top of a distributed storage system. That means real systems engineering: concurrency, retries, long-running operations, large-object data paths, hot read/write paths, metadata correctness, and AWS-compatible behavior. You will lead features end-to-end: from requirement clarification, through design and implementation, to test plan and to production. You will debug hard technical issues. You will read traces and metrics, chase down bugs, and fix problems that do not show up in toy environments. This team is for engineers who want to understand the system deeply and own important parts of it. Not just contribute code. Own it. What You Will Be Doing Writing C/C++ code on the S3 data path and metadata path Implementing S3 behavior that must match AWS externally, even when the internal system is under concurrency, retry pressure, or failure conditions Owning features end-to-end, from design through rollout and production support Debugging real production issues using traces and metrics. Improving performance on hot paths like high-concurrency GET workloads and large-object PUT flows Building software that is observable and supportable in production Working on real customer problems, including workloads that matter to major enterprise environments and AI infrastructure What You Won’t Be Doing Writing dead code that never arrives at customers Spending your days in a boring daily sync meeting Chasing architects to approve decision Senior Software Engineer Key Responsibilities Make sound technical decisions on S3 behavior, correctness, performance, and supportability Own an important part of the S3 stack deeply, not superficially Drive features from an ambiguous requirement to production Maintain a high-quality bar under real-world constraints, not idealized ones Write code that other engineers can trust in production Help the team move faster by making the system simpler, more observable, and easier to reason about Basic Requirements Strong C/C++ engineering skills in production systems Experience in one or more of the following: S3, storage systems, TCP/networking, distributed infrastructure Ability to reason clearly about correctness under concurrency, retries, failover, and long-running operations Comfort working close to storage and networking boundaries A strong bias for ownership, quality, observability, and getting important things safely into production