Position Summary...

What you'll do...

Position Summary – to be used in the job description summary column

Job Ad Description

Principal Engineer (Private Cloud Storage - Ceph)

Job Summary

We are seeking a highly skilled Principal Engineer (Ceph Storage) with 15–18 years of deep technical experience in distributed storage systems. This role is focused on hands-on architecture, operations, performance tuning, and troubleshooting of multi-petabyte scale Ceph clusters in mission-critical environments. The ideal candidate will have strong expertise across Linux, networking, storage internals, and distributed systems, with the ability to diagnose complex issues spanning hardware, kernel, and Ceph layers.

This role requires a technical leader and subject matter expert (SME) who can architect resilient storage platforms, resolve production incidents under pressure, and drive innovation in private cloud storage at scale.

About the team

Our Private Cloud Storage Engineering team is responsible for building and operating some of the largest-scale Ceph storage clusters in the industry, supporting mission-critical applications across Walmart’s global ecosystem. With hundreds of PB of data under management across multiple production clusters, we provide the backbone of reliable, secure, and high-performance storage for business operations, customer platforms, and innovation workloads.

The team works at the intersection of distributed storage systems, Linux internals, networking, and cloud infrastructure, solving some of the toughest technical challenges in scalability, performance, and resilience. We embrace a culture of deep technical expertise, hands-on problem solving, and continuous learning, while driving adoption of automation, observability, and next-generation storage technologies.

As part of this team, you will collaborate with world-class engineers across compute, networking, security, and cloud to design end-to-end solutions, shape the future of enterprise storage platforms, and contribute to the broader open-source storage community.

What You’ll Do (3 to 5 brief pointers about the roles and responsibility)

Ceph Storage Architecture & Operations

• Architect, deploy, and manage large-scale Ceph clusters across multiple production sites.
• Ensure storage availability, data durability, and cluster resiliency through advanced CRUSH map configurations, erasure coding, and replication strategies.
• Define upgrade strategy, cluster augmentation, node rebalancing, and hardware refreshes with minimal downtime.
• Own end-to-end lifecycle management of Ceph, including OS/Kernel tuning, firmware upgrades, and hardware integration.

Performance, Debugging & Troubleshooting

• Identify, diagnose, and resolve performance bottlenecks across Ceph, Linux kernel, networking, and hardware layers.
• Utilize tools such as perf, blktrace, iostat, tcpdump, bpftrace, atop, ceph tell/ceph health detail for advanced debugging.
• Perform deep analysis of OSD, MON, MDS, RGW performance and optimize cluster parameters.
• Debug network congestion, packet loss, latency, and RDMA/Ethernet issues impacting Ceph.
• Drive root cause analysis (RCA) for critical production issues and provide long-term remediation.

Automation & Observability

• Build and standardise automation for cluster deployment, expansion, and monitoring using Ansible, Terraform, and custom Python/Shell scripts.
• Develop observability views for real-time monitoring of IOPS, throughput, latency, and cluster health.
• Automate alerting, log analysis, and anomaly detection for proactive incident response.

Scalability & Innovation

• Design storage solutions to scale to hundreds of nodes and multiple petabytes while ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.
• Collaborate with compute and networking teams to integrate Ceph with Kubernetes, OpenStack, and VM workloads.
• Research and implement new features like CephFS, RGW S3/Swift gateways, Bluestore optimizations, RocksDB tuning.
• Evaluate next-gen hardware (NVMe SSDs, RDMA NICs, high-density HDDs) and their impact on Ceph performance.
• Evaluate next-gen server SKUs, perform benchmarking, and compare options to select the most appropriate storage hardware.

Security & Compliance

• Implement encryption (at-rest and in-transit), access controls, and audit mechanisms for secure data management.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise and regulatory standards (e.g., PCI-DSS, SOC, HIPAA).

Collaboration & Mentorship

• Act as technical SME for Ceph within the organization, mentoring junior engineers.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (Compute, Networking, Cloud, Security) to ensure seamless infrastructure integration.

• Partner with vendors and the Ceph community to drive adoption of best practices and contribute to open-source improvements.

What You’ll bring

• 15–18 years of experience in distributed storage systems, infrastructure engineering, and Linux systems.
• 10+ years hands-on experience with Ceph, including architecture, operations, and large-scale production support.
• Proven experience managing clusters at petabyte scale with high performance and resiliency requirements.
• Strong expertise in:
  • Linux Systems: Kernel tuning, cgroups, systemd, process/thread debugging.
  • Networking: TCP/IP, VLANs, BGP/OSPF, bonding, load balancing, RDMA, Jumbo Frames.
  • Storage Internals: OSD design, Bluestore, RocksDB tuning, journaling, caching layers.
  • Performance Tools: perf, iostat, atop, strace, tcpdump, Wireshark, eBPF.
  • Debugging: Core dump analysis, kernel crash dump (kdump), system call tracing.
• Proficiency in Python and Shell scripting for automation and tooling.
• Hands-on experience with configuration management (Ansible, Salt, Puppet) and IaC tools like Terraform.
• Knowledge of containerization (Docker, Kubernetes, LXC) and their storage backends (CSI, RBD).
• Experience with monitoring and logging stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenObserve).
• Familiarity with cloud platforms (Azure, GCP, OpenStack, AWS) and hybrid cloud storage.

Preferred Skills

• Contributions to the Ceph community or other distributed storage projects.
• Experience with large-scale data replication, backup, and disaster recovery strategies.
• Exposure to AI/ML workloads on Ceph and performance optimization for GPU clusters.
• Familiarity with hardware accelerators (NVMe-oF, SPDK, DPDK).

Why this role matters

This role is critical to ensuring that our next-generation private cloud storage platform is reliable, performant, and scalable to meet future business demands. As a Principal Engineer – Ceph Storage, you will be the go-to technical authority, solving some of the most complex distributed storage problems in the enterprise world.

About Walmart Global Tech
Imagine working in an environment where one line of code can make life easier for hundreds of millions of people.  That’s what we do at Walmart Global Tech. We’re a team of software engineers, data scientists, cybersecurity expert's and service professionals within the world’s leading retailer who make an epic impact and are at the forefront of the next retail disruption. People are why we innovate, and people power our innovations. We are people-led and tech-empowered.

We train our team in the skillsets of the future and bring in experts like you to help us grow. We have roles for those chasing their first opportunity as well as those looking for the opportunity that will define their career. Here, you can kickstart a great career in tech, gain new skills and experience for virtually every industry, or leverage your expertise to innovate at scale, impact millions and reimagine the future of retail.

Work

Walmart’s culture sets us apart, and we know being together helps us innovate, learn and grow great careers. This role is based in our [Bangalore/Chennai] office for daily work, with the flexibility for associates to manage their personal lives.

Benefits

Beyond our great compensation package, you can receive incentive awards for your performance. Other great perks include a host of best-in-class benefits maternity and parental leave, PTO, health benefits, and much more.

Belonging

We aim to create a culture where every associate feels valued for who they are, rooted in respect for the individual. Our goal is to foster a sense of belonging, to create opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers, and to be a Walmart for everyone.

At Walmart, our vision is "everyone included." By fostering a workplace culture where everyone is—and feels—included, everyone wins. Our associates and customers reflect the makeup of all 19 countries where we operate. By making Walmart a welcoming place where all people feel like they belong, we’re able to engage associates, strengthen our business, improve our ability to serve customers, and support the communities where we operate.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Walmart, Inc., is an Equal Opportunities Employer – By Choice. We believe we are best equipped to help our associates, customers and the communities we serve live better when we really know them. That means understanding, respecting and valuing unique styles, experiences, identities, ideas and opinions – while being inclusive of all people.

Minimum Qualifications...

Outlined below are the required minimum qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no minimum qualifications.

Option 1: Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 5 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.
Option 2: 7 years’ experience in software engineering or related area.

Preferred Qualifications...

Outlined below are the optional preferred qualifications for this position. If none are listed, there are no preferred qualifications.

Master’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, computer information systems, software engineering, or related area and 3 years' experience in software engineering or related area., We value candidates with a background in creating inclusive digital experiences, demonstrating knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly. The ideal candidate would have knowledge of accessibility best practices and join us as we continue to create accessible products and services following Walmart’s accessibility standards and guidelines for supporting an inclusive culture.

Primary Location...

G, 1, 3, 4, 5 Floor, Building 11, Sez, Cessna Business Park, Kadubeesanahalli Village, Varthur Hobli , India