Senior Support Engineer (Distributed Storage)

Why this role exists

Simplyblock builds Kubernetes-native, software-defined NVMe-over-Fabrics block storage. Our customers run it underneath databases and stateful workloads where downtime is measured in money and latency is measured in microseconds.

When something behaves oddly in a large multi-tier distributed storage cluster, the customer talks to you. You are the person who turns a vague symptom into a reproducible root cause, a fix, and a change that keeps it from recurring.

This is not a ticket-queue job. You sit between our customers and our engineering team, you own the analysis end to end, and you have a direct hand in how the product evolves.

🛠️ What you'll do

• Analyse complex operational and software issues in a large multi-tier distributed system — data path, control plane, cluster state, and the Kubernetes layer around it.
• Own customer communication. Respond to incidents, guide customers through upgrades and migrations, and answer advanced product, architecture, and tuning questions.
• Go deep on root cause. Logs, metrics, traces, core dumps, packet captures, reproductions — whatever it takes to explain the behaviour rather than describe it.
• Coordinate resolution across engineering. Bring the pieces together from storage, networking, control plane, and platform teams, and keep momentum until the issue is genuinely closed.
• Push proactively for improvements. Permanent fixes over workarounds, better observability, better defaults, and automation that reduces both the number of incidents and the manual operations effort.
• Turn what you learn into assets — runbooks, diagnostic tooling, product feedback, and documentation the next engineer doesn't have to rediscover.

🤖 What you bring

• Networking engineering depth. TCP/IP internals, RDMA/RoCE, congestion and flow control, multipathing, MTU and offload issues — you can read a capture and tell a story with it.
• Distributed systems experience in production. A real feel for failure modes: partitions, split brain, quorum loss, tail latency, silent degradation, clock and ordering problems.
• Kubernetes operations. CSI, operators, StatefulSets, scheduling and node lifecycle, and the day-2 realities of running storage under an orchestrator.
• AI-assisted engineering as part of your workflow. Claude or comparable models and agents for log and code analysis, reproduction scripting, and customer-facing drafting. We expect you to use these tools to make yourself materially faster, and to have opinions about where they help and where they don't.
• Excellent written and spoken communication with technical customers. You stay precise and calm when the other side is not.
• A proactive, high-responsiveness mindset. You chase the loose end nobody assigned to you, and you close the loop without being asked.
• Minimum 5 years of experience in customer-facing IT support roles; ideally working with distributed systems or Kubernetes

Preferred

• DPDK, SPDK, NVMe-oF, or other kernel-bypass / userspace storage and network stacks
• Low-level Linux debugging: perf, eBPF, gdb, crash dumps, kernel and driver behaviour
• Comfortable writing Python, Go, or C for tooling, diagnostics, and reproductions
• Prior customer-facing experience at an infrastructure or storage vendor
• Fluent English required; German or other European languages a plus

🎁 What we offer

• Direct impact on a technically hard product, with a short path from your findings to shipped changes
• Work alongside the engineers who wrote the code. No escalation wall between you and them.
• The AI tooling budget to match a Claude-native company: Claude Max, Claude Code, and whatever else you can justify
• Competitive salary + equity
• A team that celebrates ambition and outstanding results. No participation trophies.