Senior Staff Engineer - AI Workloads & Storage

Overview

• Please Note: To provide the best candidate experience amidst our high application volumes, each candidate is limited to 10 applications across all open jobs within a 6-month period.  Advancing the World’s Technology Together Our technology solutions power the tools you use every day--including smartphones, electric vehicles, hyperscale data centers, IoT devices, and so much more.
• Here, you’ll have an opportunity to be part of a global leader whose innovative designs are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and powering the future.  We believe innovation and growth are driven by an inclusive culture and a diverse workforce.
• We’re dedicated to empowering people to be their true selves.
• Together, we’re building a better tomorrow for our employees, customers, partners, and communities.
• Please Note: To provide the best candidate experience amidst our high application volumes, each candidate is limited to 10 applications across all open jobs within a 6-month period.  Advancing the World’s Technology Together Our technology solutions power the tools you use every day--including smartphones, electric vehicles, hyperscale data centers, IoT devices, and so much more.
• Here, you’ll have an opportunity to be part of a global leader whose innovative designs are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and powering the future.  We believe innovation and growth are driven by an inclusive culture and a diverse workforce.
• We’re dedicated to empowering people to be their true selves.
• Together, we’re building a better tomorrow for our employees, customers, partners, and communities.
• Our technology solutions power the tools you use every day--including smartphones, electric vehicles, hyperscale data centers, IoT devices, and so much more.
• Here, you’ll have an opportunity to be part of a global leader whose innovative designs are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and powering the future.  We believe innovation and growth are driven by an inclusive culture and a diverse workforce.
• We’re dedicated to empowering people to be their true selves.
• Together, we’re building a better tomorrow for our employees, customers, partners, and communities.
• Our technology solutions power the tools you use every day--including smartphones, electric vehicles, hyperscale data centers, IoT devices, and so much more.
• Here, you’ll have an opportunity to be part of a global leader whose innovative designs are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and powering the future.  We believe innovation and growth are driven by an inclusive culture and a diverse workforce.
• We’re dedicated to empowering people to be their true selves.
• Together, we’re building a better tomorrow for our employees, customers, partners, and communities.
• Our technology solutions power the tools you use every day--including smartphones, electric vehicles, hyperscale data centers, IoT devices, and so much more.
• Here, you’ll have an opportunity to be part of a global leader whose innovative designs are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and powering the future.  We believe innovation and growth are driven by an inclusive culture and a diverse workforce.
• We’re dedicated to empowering people to be their true selves.
• Together, we’re building a better tomorrow for our employees, customers, partners, and communities.
• At the Technology Enabling Development Lab (TED), our core development focus is the host interface firmware layer that sits in the intersection of system software and flash management firmware.
• This key host interface firmware technology drives Samsung’s breakthrough V-NAND technology and enables our customers to power performance-oriented, demanding, enterprise-class applications ranging from hyper-scale data centers, to big data processing, to software defined virtualized storage arrays and infrastructures.
• We are building the next generation of NAND/SSD storage systems designed for the demands of large-scale AI.
• As the compute cost of transformer inference falls, the bottleneck is shifting to how quickly and efficiently we can move model weights, KV cache, and activations through the storage hierarchy - and NAND flash and SSDs are increasingly the tier where that data lives.
• Our focus is on making SSDs first-class citizens in the AI data path, from the NAND media and flash-translation layer up through NVMe and networked storage.
• We are looking for a Sr Staff Engineer who lives at the intersection of AI inference systems and storage/systems software.
• This is a hands-on technical leadership role: you will characterize real AI workloads, translate what you learn into architecture, and drive that direction across inference, platform, and hardware teams.
• This is a rare seat for someone who is equally comfortable reading a transformer serving stack and a Linux block-layer trace.
•   What You’ll Do Own AI workload characterization. Profile production and emerging LLM inference, RAG, and training workloads to quantify their I/O, bandwidth, latency, and capacity demands, and turn those findings into concrete storage and memory-hierarchy design decisions.
• Identify optimal data placement. Analyze workload access patterns to determine how data should be placed and separated on flash, and map those insights onto SSD data-placement technologies such as NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP) and streams to reduce write amplification and improve endurance, latency, and QoS.
• Collaborate with key customers to identify differentiating SSD capabilities for AI workloads, and develop proof-of-concept implementations as part of those customer engagements - turning workload insights into demonstrable data-path, tiering, and data-placement wins.
• Lead deep-dive performance analysis spanning the inference runtime, the Linux storage and networking stack, and the underlying hardware, tuning for latency, throughput, cost, and GPU utilization.
• Build and evaluate transactional and system-level models of proposed architectures to de-risk decisions before hardware exists, and validate them against measured behavior.
• Engage with the standards and open ecosystem - SNIA (including Storage.AI), MLCommons/MLPerf, and the open inference stack - to align our work with where the industry is heading and to shape it where we can.
• Set technical direction others build on. Make build-vs-buy and architectural calls, establish benchmarking methodology and best practices, and mentor engineers across the org.
• Partner cross-functionally with product, hardware, and research teams, and with external vendors and partners, to bring architectures from concept to deployment.
• What You Bring Bachelor's degree 15+ years relevant industry experience or Master's degree 13+ years’ experience or PhD with 10+ years relevant industry experience.
• Extensive experience (typically 10–15+ years) in systems, storage, or ML-systems software, with a track record of architecting systems that materially improved performance, reliability, or cost.
• Demonstrated technical leadership and cross-team influence: setting direction, driving decisions across organizational boundaries, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Working knowledge of modern AI inference, especially transformer architectures - attention, KV cache, batching, and the memory/compute trade-offs of serving large models.
• Deep systems-level understanding of the Linux storage stack (block layer, I/O scheduling, NVMe) and of NAND/SSD internals (flash-translation layer, garbage collection, endurance/write-amplification, latency behavior), plus hands-on performance analysis skill (e.g., perf, ftrace, eBPF, blktrace, fio).
• Fluency in Python plus a systems language (C/C++, Rust, or Go).
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or a related field preferred - or equivalent practical experience.