Technical Director

Cohesity is the leader in AI-powered data security. Over 13,600 enterprise customers, including over 85 of the Fortune 100 and nearly 70% of the Global 500, rely on Cohesity to strengthen their resilience while providing Gen AI insights into their vast amounts of data. Formed from the combination of Cohesity with Veritas’ enterprise data protection business, the company’s solutions secure and protect data on-premises, in the cloud, and at the edge. Backed by NVIDIA, IBM, HPE, Cisco, AWS, Google Cloud, and others, Cohesity is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices around the globe.  
We’ve been named a Leader by multiple analyst firms and have been globally recognized for Innovation, Product Strength, and Simplicity in Design , and our culture. 
Want to join the leader in AI-powered data security? 

We are seeking a highly accomplished Technical Leader to define and drive the architectural vision for Cohesity's next-generation distributed storage platform, filesystem architecture, data access layer, and high-performance datapath services.

This is one of the most senior individual contributor roles at Cohesity. You will shape the long-term technical strategy for how data is stored, protected, accessed, moved, and analyzed across on-premises, cloud, and AI-native environments. As a recognized expert in large-scale storage systems, you will influence product direction, guide critical architectural decisions, and mentor engineering teams across the organization.

You will work at the intersection of distributed systems, filesystems, performance engineering, data services, cloud-scale storage, and AI-enabled data management, helping build the foundation powering Cohesity's growth for years to come.

HOW YOU'LL SPEND YOUR TIME HERE:

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Define and own the multi-year architecture roadmap for Cohesity's distributed storage platform, filesystem technologies, and datapath services.

• Drive the evolution of core storage subsystems including metadata management, caching, indexing, replication, deduplication, compression, snapshots, and recovery workflows.

• Author foundational architecture documents and technical strategies that influence multiple engineering organizations.

• Lead complex cross-functional initiatives involving platform, cloud, security, AI, product, and customer-facing teams.

• Serve as a technical authority and represent Cohesity's storage architecture vision with customers, partners, and industry leaders.

• Drive architectural decisions that improve scalability, resiliency, performance, operational simplicity, and cost efficiency.

Filesystem & Storage Platform Innovation

• Design and evolve highly scalable distributed filesystem architectures capable of handling exabyte-scale workloads.

• Lead development of next-generation metadata services, namespace management, storage virtualization, and data placement algorithms.

• Drive innovations in SmartFiles, Data Access Layer, data indexing, and advanced file services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

• Architect storage solutions optimized for structured, unstructured, backup, archive, and AI training workloads.

• Improve storage efficiency through advanced data reduction techniques including deduplication, compression, erasure coding, and intelligent tiering.

• Establish best practices for filesystem consistency, fault tolerance, recovery, and self-healing capabilities.

• Drive adoption of modern storage technologies including NVMe, object storage, cloud-native storage services, and software-defined storage architectures.

Datapath & Performance Engineering

• Own the technical vision for Cohesity's end-to-end datapath, including ingestion, storage, retrieval, replication, recovery, and analytics workflows.

• Design high-throughput, low-latency data movement frameworks capable of supporting petabyte-scale deployments.

• Optimize CPU, memory, networking, and storage subsystems to maximize platform performance and efficiency.

• Lead architecture initiatives for workload balancing, caching strategies, intelligent prefetching, and IO scheduling.

• Drive performance benchmarking and capacity planning across large-scale customer environments.

• Develop strategies to improve system observability, telemetry, diagnostics, and operational excellence across the datapath stack.

• Lead root-cause analysis and resolution of complex scalability and performance bottlenecks.

AI-Driven Data Platform Innovation

• Drive the storage architecture required to support emerging AI and GenAI workloads.

• Design data access patterns and retrieval architectures optimized for AI applications, vector workloads, and large-scale analytics.

• Collaborate with AI platform teams to enable efficient data pipelines, feature stores, vector indexing, and retrieval systems.

• Define strategies for AI-assisted storage optimization, workload prediction, anomaly detection, and automated performance tuning.

• Influence the architecture of data services that support RAG, intelligent search, and AI-powered data discovery.

Engineering Excellence & Mentorship

• Raise the technical bar through deep design reviews, architecture evaluations, code reviews, and hands-on technical leadership.

• Mentor senior and principal engineers across storage, platform, and cloud infrastructure organizations.

• Establish engineering standards for performance, reliability, scalability, maintainability, and operational excellence.

• Lead technical investigations, proof-of-concepts, and adoption of emerging storage technologies.

• Partner with engineering leadership on roadmap planning, talent strategy, and technical succession planning.

WE'D LOVE TO TALK TO YOU IF YOU HAVE MANY OF THE FOLLOWING:

Required

• 15+ years of software engineering experience with deep expertise in storage systems, distributed systems, filesystems, or cloud infrastructure platforms.

• Proven Principal, Distinguished, or Staff+ level impact delivering large-scale storage or distributed systems that operate in production at significant scale.

• Deep expertise in distributed filesystem architecture, metadata management, storage services, and large-scale data platforms.

• Extensive experience building highly available, fault-tolerant, and horizontally scalable systems.

• Strong understanding of storage fundamentals including filesystems, object storage, block storage, distributed storage architectures, data protection technologies, and replication and recovery systems.

• Hands-on experience with datapath optimization, performance engineering, profiling, and scalability analysis.

• Strong systems programming expertise in one or more of: C++, Go, Rust, Java.

• Deep understanding of operating system internals, concurrency, memory management, networking, and performance tuning.

• Experience designing and operating cloud-scale distributed services.

• Demonstrated ability to drive technical alignment and influence across multiple organizations without direct authority.

Preferred

• Experience with data protection, backup and recovery platforms.

• Strong background in SmartFiles, Data Access Layer architecture, storage virtualization, or global namespace technologies.

• Experience building storage solutions for AI, machine learning, analytics, or high-performance computing workloads.

• Expertise with NVMe, RDMA, high-speed networking, Kubernetes storage, or software-defined storage platforms.

• Familiarity with modern cloud storage ecosystems including AWS, Azure, and GCP.

• Contributions to storage-related open-source projects, standards bodies, or industry publications.

• Patents, technical papers, or recognized industry contributions in distributed systems or storage technologies.

• Experience driving architecture for multi-tenant SaaS data platforms.

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Equal Employment Opportunity Employer (EEOE)
Cohesity is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin or nationality, ancestry, age, disability, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status or any other category protected by law.
If you are an individual with a disability and require a reasonable accommodation to complete any part of the application process, or are limited in the ability or unable to access or use this online application process and need an alternative method for applying, you may contact us at 1-855-9COHESITY or [email protected] for assistance.
In-Office Expectations
Cohesity employees who are within a reasonable commute (e.g. within a forty-five (45) minute average travel time) work out of our core offices 2-3 days a week of their choosing.

We strongly prefer candidates who are currently located in or near the designated job location. Candidates outside the area should apply only if they are committed to relocating prior to their start date and have the legal right to work in the job location.