Principal Ceph Storage Engineer

Imagine a future where everyone has instant, low-cost access to intelligence. We’re building a fully featured European AI cloud - with everything one needs to train, experiment with, and deploy AI models. In addition, our GPUs run on 100% renewable energy.

We’re ambitious, curious, and gutsy doers. We practice a low hierarchy across the company and high morale in our teams. We’ve already achieved a lot, yet we’re only getting started. Now it’s your chance to join the ride. We offer more than just the job - we offer a career-defining opportunity to be part of building something big!

Join Verda while it’s still being built - not once it’s finished.

About the role

We are looking for a Principal Ceph Storage Engineer who is as skilled with people and prose as they are with placement groups. Running a fast-paced environment means we cannot afford "black box" wizards who keep the storage architecture in their heads. We need an articulate architect: someone with deep, long-term Ceph experience who treats documentation as a first-class citizen, loves mentoring, and can act as an open, collaborative bridge between our storage infrastructure and the rest of our engineering organization.

Your Responsibilities

• Architect Standalone Storage Ecosystems: Lead the architectural design, capacity planning, and lifecycle management of our global, pure Ceph topology.

• Demystify the Storage Layer: Author clear, accessible, and comprehensive documentation, post-mortems, and runbooks so that the broader SRE and On-Call teams feel empowered, not intimidated, by Ceph.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner directly with compute, networking, and platform teams to understand their storage bottlenecks and co-design high-performance solutions.

• Mentor & Elevate: Actively mentor mid-level and senior engineers, raising the collective storage IQ of the entire engineering organization.

• Drive Zero-Downtime Upgrades: Lead the orchestration and testing pipelines to seamlessly transition our fleet across major releases (e.g., Reef, Squid) without user impact.

• Deep-Level Troubleshooting: Act as the ultimate tier-of-last-resort for complex recovery scenarios (stuck PGs, peering anomalies), while calmly communicating status updates to leadership during high-pressure events.

Your Key Requirements

• Deep, Long-Term Ceph Expertise: 8+ years of infrastructure engineering experience, with 5+ years solely focused on multi-petabyte production Ceph clusters.

• Exceptional Technical Communication: You can break down a complex distributed system failure or a CRUSH map redesign into a clear, concise written narrative. You value clarity over jargon.

• Technical Empathy & Collaboration: A track record of working constructively across teams. You don't just say "no" to feature requests; you explain the "why" and collaborate on alternative paths.

• Decoupled Identity Concept: Proven success running pure Ceph natively outside of traditional cloud wrappers like OpenStack.

• Low-Level Linux Storage Mastery: Profound understanding of the Linux storage stack, including device mapper, NVMe-over-Fabrics, asynchronous I/O frameworks, and kernel/user-space boundaries.

Nice-to-Haves

• Upstream Ceph contributor (code, documentation, or active bug reporting).

• Experience giving technical presentations, writing engineering blogs, or leading internal "brown bag" tech talks.

• Experience architecting Ceph CSI plugins within massive, raw bare-metal Kubernetes architectures.

Why Verda

• Cash + equity compensation along with various fringe benefits (e.g., healthcare, lunch, wellbeing, etc.).

• Profitable operations with rapid, sustained growth.

• 31 nationalities, with 6 different ones on the management team.

• An opportunity to make a clear impact and work alongside world-class engineers, researchers, and partners across the global AI ecosystem.

Practicalities

• Work mode: Remote (EU)

• Employment type: Full-time, permanent

• Start date: As soon as possible