Staff Engineer, System Design Engineering

Staff Engineer, System Design Engineering

The ideal candidate will be responsible for designing, defining, implementing, and enabling comprehensive benchmark tests for AI infrastructure platforms, including box-level GPU systems, multi-GPU servers, and GPU rack-scale deployments. This role requires a strong understanding of AI workloads, system architectures, and performance characterization methodologies across modern AI infrastructure environments.

The individual will work closely with Marketing, Product Management and System Architecture teams to understand benchmark requirements and translate business and customer use cases into measurable performance validation strategies. The candidate will develop benchmark proposals, define evaluation methodologies, and execute performance studies for a wide range of AI applications, including Chat Assistants and LLM inference, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Speech AI, Vision AI, multimodal AI, recommendation systems, and Image/Video Generation workloads.

Responsibilities include selecting and optimizing benchmark frameworks, configuring AI software stacks, validating hardware and software performance, analyzing bottlenecks across compute, memory, storage, and networking subsystems, and generating detailed performance reports with actionable insights. The candidate will evaluate AI workloads across different hardware configurations such as GPUs, CPUs, accelerators, high-speed interconnects, NVLink/NVSwitch fabrics, storage architectures, and network fabrics to compare scalability, latency, throughput, power efficiency, and cost-performance metrics.

The role also involves collaborating with internal and external partners to enable emerging AI models, benchmark suites, and infrastructure technologies, while ensuring reproducibility, automation, and continuous benchmarking capabilities within AI lab environments. Strong analytical, scripting, and performance tuning skills are essential, along with hands-on experience in AI frameworks, GPU computing, distributed inference environments, and performance monitoring tools.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Design & Validate AI Infrastructure for Benchmarks
• Analysis of Benchmarks for End-to-end AI Infrastructure and develop test environment for Benchmark tests
• Define and Perform Benchmark tests for AI workloads on storage systems
• Evaluate GPU vs CPU vs storage bottlenecks in AI pipelines
• Research and innovate Benchmarks for AI workloads on storage specific to Inference & training for major models
• Design Benchmarks for Vector DB & KV cache
• Optimize Data pipelines for Inference and training
• Analyze Benchmark results, document and publish with recommendations Research and implement innovative ways to validate PCIe/NVMe SSD debug infrastructure. Work with cross-functional teams for POC and architecture discussions for validation infrastructure.

Required:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering with 5+ years of experience, or a Master's degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering with 2+ years of experience.

Skills:

• Experience with different Operating Systems (Windows, Linux, VMware).
• Scripting and/or programming languages, such as Shell scripts, Python, C/C++ are required.
• AI Infrastructure & Hardware Awareness – GPU/CPU architecture basics
• Experience in Performance & Benchmarking – profiling tools, system bottlenecks
• Debugging knowledge on performance bottlenecks in AI pipelines
• Experience in deriving data movement costs on Edge platforms

Sandisk is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person's gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.

We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your Rights:
Workplace Discrimination is Illegal" poster. Our pay transparency policy is available here.

Sandisk thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives…