Principal Software Engineer, Sustaining

Summary of Role

We are looking for a highly skilled Principal Sustaining Software Engineer to act as the technical leader for our sustaining engineering team. In this role, youll combine deep enterprise software expertise with a passion for solving the most complex customer issues. Youll be the first stop for escalations, a mentor to peers, and a builder of tools and processes that make our platform more reliable and supportable at scale.

Primary Responsibilities

As a Principal Sustaining Engineer, you will

• Serve as the technical escalation point for the most complex customer cases.
• Diagnose, reproduce, and resolve challenging product and environment issues.
• Lead root-cause analysis and contribute fixes across C/C++ and Python codebases.
• Design and implement tooling, scripts, and observability improvements for supportability.
• Participate in design/code reviews and collaborate with core engineering teams.
• Mentor senior and sustaining engineers in technical debugging, coding, and process rigor.
• Act as a bridge between Customer Success and Engineering, ensuring customer pain points translate into product improvements.
• Be a part of the quarterly 24x7 on-call rotation.

Required skills

• 8-10 years of enterprise software or storage platform development experience.
• Expert-level skills in Linux internals (memory, filesystems, networking, security).
• Strong coding expertise in C, C++, Python, and Bash.
• Hands-on debugging experience with gdb, valgrind, tcpdump, wireshark.
• Knowledge of authentication (AD, LDAP), distributed systems, and filesystems (XFS, EXT4).
• Experience handling high-severity customer escalations.
• Excellent problem-solving, collaboration, and mentoring abilities.

Its a bonus if you have

Prior leadership of technical war rooms or major incident response.

Experience with hypervisors, CI/CD systems, and cloud integration.

Contributions to open-source storage or Linux communities.