Senior Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure

About Backblaze

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $100m in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud - managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

Want to know what you’ll be doing?

You will work on our data infrastructure platform which supports the B2 Object Storage and Computer Backup products, responsible for the data infrastructure that everything runs on. You will help improve automation, observability and stability for durability, increase throughput, and drive architectural changes to support the long term requirements of our service.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build automation frameworks that let other engineers provision, configure, and repair fleet infrastructure themselves
• Design and extend the observability stack (metrics, logs, traces, alerts) that tells us whether the storage platform is healthy and where it is degrading
• Build reporting, dashboards, and visualizations that give engineering and leadership a clear view into fleet health, capacity, and operational trends
• Build system health tooling that detects failing hardware, drifting configuration, and capacity risk before they turn into incidents
• Lead technical design discussions and produce clear design documents for changes that span multiple services and teams
• Drive the implementation of large features from design through rollout, including the migration and backfill work that real systems require
• Partner with the on-call rotation to turn recurring toil and incident findings into automation and better signal

The Right Fit:

• 7+ years of backend development in an enterprise environment, working in an object-oriented or systems language (Java, Rust, C++, C#, Go, or similar)
• Experience designing automation frameworks or platforms that other engineers build on
• Experience building large scale software systems running on thousands of servers
• Experience building automation or tooling that other engineers depend on daily, whether internal platform services, operational tooling, or a deployment and configuration pipeline
• Working knowledge of an observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, Datadog, or equivalent), including instrumenting a service and designing alerts people trust
• Strong Linux fundamentals and comfort operating in a bare-metal or hybrid environment rather than a fully managed cloud
• Professional experience incorporating AI-assisted development tools (Gemini, Cursor, Claude Code, or similar)
• Comfortable with all aspects of the software development lifecycle, including design, implementation, testing, and rollout
• Exhibits curiosity and seeks to understand before offering solutions
• Communicates proactively in a remote environment by keeping the team informed, surfacing blockers early, and moving work forward
• Applies analytical thinking to ambiguous problems

Bonus points for:

• Proficiency in Java
• Experience with configuration management or infrastructure-as-code tooling (Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Chef, Terraform)
• Experience designing SLOs and error budgets, or reducing alert noise on a fleet running at scale
• Experience with time-series databases and query languages such as PromQL
• Experience automating hardware lifecycle work: burn-in, failure detection, drive replacement, decommissioning
• Experience with discovering and implementing performance improvements, including CPU and IO
• Understanding of Linux internals and file systems
• Familiarity with hard drive performance and optimization, including host-managed SMR
• Experience building and interpreting models, dashboards, or reports

At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about the job description you're reading. Learning, developing, and growing are key parts of our culture, so even if you don't meet every requirement, we still encourage you to apply.