HPC Storage Engineering Lead | Quant Finance Research Firm

We’re supporting a global quantitative research and engineering organisation that depends on extremely high‑throughput, low‑latency storage systems to fuel large‑scale modelling, simulation, and data‑driven research. They are now hiring an HPC Storage Engineering Lead/Manager to take ownership of a mission‑critical storage landscape – shaping the long‑term technical direction, leading a specialist engineering team, and ensuring the platform can keep pace with increasingly complex compute demands. This role blends strategic influence with hands‑on technical depth. You will guide the evolution of multi‑petabyte storage estates, introduce modern automation practices, and work directly with researchers and platform groups whose workloads push infrastructure to its limits.

Key Responsibilities

• Set and steer the roadmap for storage platform evolution, ensuring systems can support rapidly expanding compute and data requirements.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of storage engineers, establishing high technical standards and a culture centred on ownership and delivery.
• Oversee the end‑to‑end lifecycle of storage services – architecture, deployment, tuning, reliability, and operational health.
• Drive continuous optimisation across distributed storage systems, improving throughput, latency, resiliency, and operational predictability.
• Engage directly with storage vendors, influencing product direction and ensuring best‑in‑class support and deployment practices.
• Own capacity strategy, hardware refresh cycles, and multi‑year forecasting across a large and rapidly expanding estate.
• Partner with research, compute, and data engineering teams to ensure storage behaviours align with modelling, machine learning, and high‑performance workloads.
• Introduce and champion automation, Infrastructure‑as‑Code, and DevOps‑oriented ways of working across the storage function.
• Collaborate with architectural and innovation teams to evaluate next‑generation technologies and modernise the environment accordingly.
• Promote engineering discipline, documentation quality, and clear operational processes for both senior leadership and partnering teams.

What You’ll Bring

• Deep hands‑on knowledge (6+ years) of modern high‑performance storage stacks (such as VAST, Isilon, or equivalent scalable distributed systems).
• Demonstrated experience (3+ years) leading engineering teams within large, fast‑moving technical environments.
• Strong ability to communicate clearly with a wide variety of stakeholders, including research, platform, and infrastructure groups.
• Practical experience designing automation, tooling, and workflows that simplify operations and enhance platform reliability.
• Familiarity with CI/CD, configuration automation, observability tooling, and SRE‑style operational thinking.
• Understanding of how demanding compute or ML workloads consume storage, including performance characteristics and access patterns.
• Experience integrating cloud storage – preferably AWS – into hybrid or on‑premises architectures.
• A strong focus on secure design, data integrity, and building highly resilient systems.