Principal Ceph Storage Engineer

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 Department Research & Development Locations EU Remote status Fully Remote About Verda Verda (formerly DataCrunch) is a technology company building the next generation of cloud infrastructure for AI – compute that's instant, on-demand and at scale. Headquartered in Helsinki, the company operates globally across Europe, the US and Asia. Verda employs over 100 people from nearly 30 nationalities and has raised over $200M in total funding from investors including Lifeline Ventures, byFounders, J12 Ventures, Skaala, Varma and Tesi, alongside leading financial institutions.