SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Cohesity, the leader in AI-powered data security serving over 13,600 enterprise customers including 85+ Fortune 100 companies, is seeking a Technical Director to define and drive the architectural vision for its 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 the company.
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.
Key responsibilities include:
**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 representing Cohesity's storage architecture vision with customers, partners, and industry leaders.
**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.
**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.
**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.
**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. Partner with engineering leadership on roadmap planning, talent strategy, and technical succession planning.
**Requirements:**
- 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 Qualifications:**
- 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
Cohesity employees within reasonable commute distance (approximately 45 minutes average travel time) work out of core offices 2-3 days per week of their choosing. The company strongly prefers candidates currently located in or near Bengaluru and committed to relocating if necessary.
