“What are the important problems of your field? What important problems are you working on? If what you are doing is not important, and if you don't think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?”
- Richard Hamming
We are a team in Azure Compute responsible for utilizing exabytes of storage in Microsoft datacenters. Our software aggregates unused disk space and makes it available to customers both as block storage - we have created Petabyte-sized disks in the past - as well as relational storage available through a SQL interface.
Our technology is unique because it works at every level of software stack - from the deepest level of kernel storage drivers, to massively replicated, PAXOS-based system that coordinates storage allocation.
Our team subscribes to all modern paradigms of software development - we roll out to production every week, we code-review every change, we design high-scale, loosely coupled systems with fail-safe mechanisms built in, we do copious amount of production debugging, testing and monitoring, and we collect the data before writing code. And we have been doing it for the last five years.
We are looking for senior and principal engineers who can help us take the system to the next level: going from single exabytes to tens and eventually hundreds of exabytes of storage. You need to have a non-trivial, multi-release, deep experience (at least five years) with either massively distributed systems, or operating systems kernel and driver development. Experience with the Windows Storage stack is preferred, but not required. You should be a master coder in C++ (on a scale from one to ten where Stroustrup is eight, we expect you to be no less than five). You should be able to think on your feet, produce simple solutions, implement them quickly and efficiently, and guide them to success in production deployments.
Why should you work on our team?
Our technology is one of the top two or three most advanced systems in its field on the planet. If you love storage and distributed systems, this is the system to work on. If you have expertise in operating systems development, and would like to expand into distributed systems, or vice versa, this is a great opportunity to capitalize on your existing expertise while learning the other universe.
We have the resources of a huge, powerful company behind it, but none of the bureaucratic overhead that is often associated with it. We are at the tip of tens of billions of dollars the company is investing in software services in general, and Azure in particular.
You will work with brilliant people on a project that directly impacts thousands of developers, and indirectly impacts hundreds of millions of customers. You will learn new things, and share your knowledge with us.
Interested? Send your resume to sergeyso@microsoft.com and we will be happy to talk more!
