Principal Engineer, Cloud Storage Architect

The Cloud Storage Architect will serve as a key industry intelligence leader, responsible for continuously gathering, evaluating, and translating the latest advancements in cloud and clustered storage architectures into actionable insights for Western Digital’s test and validation teams. By monitoring how major cloud providers design, deploy, and operate large-scale storage systems—including S3-compatible object storage, distributed clusters, and hyperscale data durability models—the architect will help ensure HDD test strategies accurately reflect real-world customer environments. This role will actively share emerging cloud-storage trends, workload behaviors, and architectural patterns with System Test, Automated Cluster Environment and HDD qualification teams, enabling the creation of more representative, robust, and forward-looking tests.

Key Responsibilities

• Continuously gather and evaluate current cloud and clustered storage industry practices, including architectures, deployment models, workload behaviors, durability methods, and scaling patterns used by major cloud providers.
• Monitor and analyze hyperscaler storage trends—such as S3 object storage evolution, erasure-coding strategies, zoned-storage adoption, multi-tier storage models, and distributed cluster topologies—to ensure internal teams stay aligned with real-world customer environments.
• Translate up-to-date cloud storage insights into actionable guidance for System Test, ACE, and HDD qualification teams to develop more representative, customer-centric test methodologies.
• Identify gaps between existing HDD test flows and modern industry storage designs, recommending new tests, workloads, cluster configurations, or validation scenarios that better emulate cloud-scale usage patterns.
• Collaborate with System Test teams to enhance HDD validation based on how cloud companies actually deploy drives, manage fleets, perform lifecycle operations, and optimize storage performance and reliability.
• Work with the ACE team to design cluster-level workloads and test architectures informed by current cloud storage engineering, including S3 patterns, object sizes, concurrency, and real customer traffic profiles.
• Act as the internal subject matter expert on cloud and distributed storage, regularly sharing findings, documentation, trend analyses, and architectural summaries with engineering, validation, and leadership groups.
• Evaluate emerging storage technologies and standards, such as SMR, ZNS, object-tiering strategies, or cloud-native filesystem trends, and recommend their incorporation into future HDD testing.
• Advise HDD qualification teams on cloud-driven reliability expectations, informing improvements in stress testing, durability tests, long-run cluster experiments, and field-emulation workloads.
• Produce clear technical reports, briefs, and knowledge-sharing materials summarizing evolving cloud storage behaviors, helping all test teams stay current with industry direction.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related fields.
• 8+ years experience designing or operating distributed cloud storage systems.
• Fluency in cloud computing concepts, architecture, and technologies with hands-on experience in designing and implementing cloud solutions.
• Expertise with object storage technologies (HDFS, TOS, AliYun, LongXi OS, MinIO, AWS S3, Azure Blob, GCP Cloud Storage).
• Excellent communication and cross-team collaboration capabilities.
• Ability to translate complex cloud architecture concepts into actionable test improvements.
• Analytical, data-driven mindset with strong problem-solving skills.