R&D Hardware System Engineer

VAST Data is looking for a R&D Hardware System Engineer to join our growing team!

This is a great opportunity to be part of the fastest‑growing infrastructure company in history.

"VAST's data management vision is the future of the market." - Forbes

VAST Data is the data platform company for the AI era. We are building the enterprise software infrastructure to capture, catalog, refine, enrich, and protect massive datasets and make them available for real‑time data analysis and AI training and inference. Designed from the ground up to make AI simple to deploy and manage, VAST takes the cost and complexity out of deploying enterprise and AI infrastructure across data center, edge, and cloud.

Our success has been built through intense innovation, a customer‑first mentality and a team of fearless VASTronauts who leverage their skills & experiences to make real market impact. This is an opportunity to be a key contributor at a pivotal time in our company’s growth and at a pivotal point in computing history.

VAST Data’s Hardware Team defines and maintains VAST’s reference hardware architecture and oversees all JBOF development carried out by ODM partners.

We qualify new servers, SSDs, and networking equipment to ensure they meet our performance and reliability standards.

We collaborate closely with hardware vendors to shape new features and debug existing products.

We work with business partners to ensure that VAST software operates correctly on their server platforms.

Additionally, we provide knowledge transfer to software development teams, train customer support engineers, support VAST’s hardware integration partners, and take responsibility for diagnosing and resolving hardware‑related issues encountered by customers.

• Define and maintain reference hardware architecture.
• Oversee JBOF development carried out by ODM partners.
• Qualify new servers, SSDs, and networking equipment.
• Collaborate closely with hardware vendors to shape new features and debug existing products.
• Work with business partners to ensure VAST software operates correctly on their server platforms.
• Provide knowledge transfer to software development teams.
• Train customer support engineers.
• Support VAST’s hardware integration partners.
• Diagnose and resolve hardware‑related issues encountered by customers.

• Ability to travel to integrator manufacturing sites in Arizona to drive custom and 3rd party servers and do knowledge transfer to the software and customer support teams.
• Hands‑on experience with Linux servers.
• Demonstrate system‑level understanding from low‑level hardware through firmware and OS drivers.
• Server design: x86 CPUs, BMC, IPMI, Redfish, I2C/SMBus, BIOS, UEFI, design for high availability, thermal design.
• PCIe:
  Configuration space, configuration procedures by the OS, hot‑plug, transport layer, PCIe switch, SR‑IOV.
  
  Experience with PCIe Gen.
  4+ is an advantage.
• Storage systems: NVMe SSDs, NVMeOF, RAID, OCP SSDs.
• Networking: 100/200/400/800G Ethernet, Infini Band, RDMA, NVMeoF, QoS, Flow Control, VxLANs, Optical Transceivers, cables, and DPUs.
• Linux:
  Device drivers, memory management, hardware debug and test tools.
• Vendor management experience.
• B.Sc. EE or CS (M.Sc. an advantage).
• 4+ years of experience.