We are building Silica storage from the media all the way up the storage stack to the cloud service user API, and co-designing and optimizing the hardware and software stack to achieve the best cost/performance for data centre deployments.

Among other things, we are re-thinking: scheduling of resources ranging from robots to lasers to machine learning inference chips; new algorithms for media management, data placement, and error correction; hardware form factors and software interfaces to enable cost-efficient, fully-disaggregated system designs, and much more. All this follows a data-driven approach based on workload demands and insights from our partners in Microsoft Azure Storage.

Clean-slate design from the media level up also means solving hard problems in physics, optics, industrial design, machine learning, and more. The Project Silica team is a vibrant and diverse mix of researchers spanning all these areas and offers plenty of opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and learning, at their intersection with core system research.

Responsibilities

In this role, you will drive a research agenda aimed at dictating the best system design for a Silica storage data centre deployment.

This could involve storage stack design; analysis of real Microsoft cloud workloads; design and exploration of system policies and configuration parameters; new resource management algorithms; disaster recovery; etc.

You will have access to workloads from our internal product partners, and will work with other researchers in storage, hardware design, optical science, and machine learning, as necessary. You will also remain an active participant in your research community by disseminating your work through publications, conference attendance and service, etc.

Qualifications

Minimum Qualifications

• PhD in computer science or equivalent industry experience in a research environment, with a focus on storage systems, distributed systems, operating systems, networking, or related.
• Capability for rapid and accurate development of research prototype code in C#, or similar.
• Creative and collaborative approach to problem solving.

Preferred Qualifications

• Publishing track record in computer systems (e.g., SOSP, OSDI, NSDI, Eurosys, FAST, ATC, SoCC, Sigcomm, etc.)
• Experience successfully leading a computer systems research agenda.
• Experience working in large codebases.