Senior Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure

About the role

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

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

Required for all Backblaze Employees:

Good attitude and willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done

Strong desire to work for a small, fast-paced company

Desire to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technologies and work environment

Rigorous adherence to best practices

Relentless attention to detail

Excellent interpersonal skills and good oral/written communication

Excellent troubleshooting and problem solving skills

Backblaze Perks:

Healthcare for family, including dental and vision

Competitive compensation and 401K

RSU grants for full-time employees

ESPP program

Flexible vacation policy

Maternity & paternity leave

MacBook Pro to use for work plus a generous stipend to personalize your workstation

Childcare bonus (human children only)

Fertility treatment and support

Learning & development program

Commuter benefits

Culture that supports a healthy work-life balance

To provide greater transparency to candidates, we share base pay ranges for all US-based job postings regardless of state. We set standard base pay ranges for all roles based on function, level, and country location, benchmarked against similar-stage growth companies. Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including candidate location, skills, depth of work experience, and relevant licenses/credentials, and may vary from the amounts listed below.

The base pay range for this position is:

$175,000 - $200,000

At Backblaze, we value being fair and good to our customers, partners, and employees. That’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the core of our values. We are committed to fostering a workforce where all employees feel a sense of belonging regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, socio-economic status, ability, veteran status, and education. We believe that our dedication to cultivating a diverse workspace not only allows us to better serve our customers in over 175 countries, but further reinforces our commitment to doing the right thing. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.

To understand more about the data we collect and process as part of your application, please view our Backblaze Employee Privacy Notice.