Storage Architect

At Jefferson Lab, you’ll champion cutting‑edge science and operational excellence while shaping the future of discovery. Join us and make your mark - where excellence meets purpose, and great minds truly matter. Salary Range: $115,900 - $205,100 (SCS-III) What your job will be like: You are the principal authority on storage architecture for the High‑Performance Data Facility (HPDF), leading the design of a large‑scale, multi‑tiered, distributed storage system purpose‑built for DOE scientific data lifecycle. You research and evaluate the full landscape of commercial vendors, cloud providers, and open‑source distributed storage solutions, develop performance and cost models, and work closely with peer architects to ensure coherent, well‑grounded technology selections as the project advances toward its design milestones. When the facility is complete, you lead the HPDF storage operations team, owning storage infrastructure across its distributed locations. In this job you will: Technology Landscape Analysis: Research and evaluate the storage technology landscape across commercial vendors, cloud storage providers, and open‑source distributed file systems. Directly engage with vendors, identifying and assessing candidate solutions. Develop comparative assessments that inform architecture decisions and support acquisitions. Design Leadership: Lead the technical design and architectural planning for a multi‑tiered, widely distributed storage system that meets varied scientific data needs. The varied scientific data needs include incorporating storage reliability, immutability, data integrity, and performance principles across the facility's distributed locations. Performance and Cost Modeling: Develop and validate models to predict storage performance, capacity requirements, and total cost of ownership at scale. Must define Key Performance Parameters (KPPs) and benchmarking strategies that will govern storage system selection and validation. Metrics and Observability: Establish the foundation for storage system observability, defining initial SLOs and SLIs for storage performance and availability, architecting, and prototyping. Implement monitoring and alerting solutions that will support both the design validation phase and future facility operations. Establish Storage Team Framework: Define the operational framework and staffing plans for the future Storage team, which will be responsible for the lifecycle management of the entire storage infrastructure. Experience Required: 10 or more years IT infrastructure. Required: 4 or more years Large‑scale storage architecture and design. Preferred: 6 or more years in developing, deploying, and testing high performance multi‑tiered, distributed storage solutions. Education Bachelor's Degree Computer Science, Information Systems, or other relevant information technology required. Master's Degree Computer Science, Information Systems, or other relevant information technology preferred. Experience and Education Exchange Education above the minimum may be substituted for experience. Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities Deep expertise in HPC, enterprise and emerging storage technologies including SAN, NAS, object storage, cloud storage, distributed file systems, parallel file systems and tape libraries. Hands‑on experience designing and deploying solutions at scale. Deep understanding of storage networking protocols and interconnects including Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NVMe‑oF, and high‑speed data transfer technologies relevant to high‑throughput scientific data workflows. Evaluating and deploying commercial high‑performance storage solutions (e.g. VAST, Weka, IBM Spectrum Scale) and open‑source distributed file systems (e.g. Ceph, Lustre, DAOS, GlusterFS) against performance, reliability, and cost requirements. Experience designing multi‑tiered, highly available, and resilient storage architectures, including data staging, archival, and immutability strategies across distributed locations. Experience developing storage performance models, capacity planning frameworks, and total cost of ownership analyses at facility scale. Familiarity with data integrity, encryption, and compliance requirements including FAIR data principles, data retention policies, and relevant federal data management standards. Experience leading small teams. About Jefferson Lab Join a community with a common purpose of solving the most challenging scientific and engineering problems of our time. The Jefferson Lab campus is located in southeastern Virginia amidst a vibrant and growing technology community. A career at Jefferson Lab is more than a job. You will be part of "big science" and work alongside top scientists and engineers from around the world unlocking the secrets of our visible universe. Managed by Jefferson Science Associates, LLC, Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility is entering an exciting period of mission growth and is seeking new team members ready to apply their skills and passion to have an impact. You could call it work, or you could call it a mission. We call it a challenge. We do things that will change the world. Total Rewards at Jefferson Lab At Jefferson Lab, we believe that a comprehensive employee benefits program is an important and meaningful part of the compensation employees receive. Our benefits program includes, but is not limited to: Medical, Dental, and Vision Care Plans Flexible Spending Accounts Paid Time‑off and Leave Programs (Paid Parental, vacation, holidays, and sick leave) 401(k) Plan - 9% Lab Contribution; 100% vested Flexible Work Arrangements (Remote & Alternate Work Schedules available) Tuition Assistance, Training and Professional Development Programs Live near the waterways of the Chesapeake Bay region with access to nearby beaches, mountains, and all major metropolitan centers on the East Coast Jefferson Science Associates, LLC (JSA) manages and operates the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab). JSA is an Equal Opportunity Employer. JSA is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities (unless doing so will result in an undue hardship). If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please send an e‑mail to View email address on click.appcast.io or contact Human Resources by calling View phone number on click.appcast.io and selecting option 1 between 8 am – 5 pm EST to provide the nature of your request. Employment with JSA is conditional upon DOE approval if at any time during your employment you are participating in a Foreign Government Talent Recruitment Program or Affiliated activity. Generally, such programs/activities include any foreign‑state‑sponsored attempt to acquire U.S.-funded scientific research through programs run or funded by the government that target scientists, engineers, students, academics, researchers, and entrepreneurs of all nationalities working or educated in the United States. This includes positions or appointments, both domestic and foreign, titled academic, professional, or institutional appointments whether or not remuneration is received and whether full‑time, part‑time or voluntary. #J-18808-Ljbffr