Senior Software Engineer

About the Role

The Windows Servicing & Delivery (WSD) team investigates and remediates security vulnerabilities and high-severity reliability issues across the Windows platform. Our Storage & File Systems division owns critical components including NTFS, ReFS, Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), WSFC, CSV, VSS, and the full storage driver stack—from NVMe/iSCSI miniport drivers to file system minifilters.

Role Overview:

• This Senior Software Engineer position bridges kernel engineering and enterprise customer reliability. You will resolve complex ICMs escalated by top-tier customers that have defeated Tier 1/2 support, owning source code for cluster states and file system structures.
• You will own reliability fixes for S2D rebuild storms, CSV failovers, NTFS corruption, and NVMe exhaustion scenarios impacting Fortune 500 environments.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Critical Incident Resolution: Own end-to-end resolution of escalated ICMs. Analyze memory dumps, ETW traces, and logs to root-cause failures in S2D, WSFC, CSV, NTFS, and ReFS.
2. Security & Vulnerability Management: Investigate CVEs including privilege escalation via reparse points, information disclosure through kernel pools, and DoS vectors. Collaborate with MSRC for coordinated patch delivery.
3. Kernel-Mode Development: Design fixes in StorPort, NVMe, iSCSI, SMB Direct drivers and file system filters. Manage the full lifecycle from root cause analysis to regression testing and servicing release.
4. S2D Expertise: Diagnose rebuild/rebalance logic errors, cache tier issues, pool fragmentation, and storage bus layer problems in hyper-converged deployments.
5. Clustering & Availability: Harden WSFC and CSV. Resolve quorum edge cases, ownership transfer failures, validation regressions, and arbitration deadlocks.
6. VSS Contributions: Fix bugs in provider/requester interactions, writer timeouts, and shadow copy metadata consistency for large-scale environments.
7. Diagnostics & Tooling: Develop kernel debugger extensions (!sdt), ETW instrumentation, and Storage Spaces health validation suites.
8. Customer Engagement: Provide expert guidance during active outages with enterprise customers and Partner Technical Advisors (PTAs).
9. Mentorship: Drive technical excellence through code reviews, design sessions, and participation in hiring loops.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field AND 8+ years of software engineering with deep expertise in C/C++ for Windows kernel-mode development (or equivalent experience).
• Hands-on experience with the Windows storage driver stack (StorPort, filters) understanding IRP flow and cancel-safe queues.
• Solid grounding in Windows kernel fundamentals and crash dump analysis using WinDbg.
• Expertise in NTFS on-disk structures (MFT, attributes, USN journal) and ReFS metadata/block cloning mechanisms.
• Proven ability to debug file system corruption scenarios (cross-linked clusters, orphaned records).
• Familiarity with Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC), Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), and Storage Spaces Direct (S2D).
• Experience with storage protocols: SMB Direct (RDMA), iSCSI multipath, NVMe-oF, Fibre Channel.
• Ability to handle high-urgency escalations (ICMs/CritSits) under time pressure.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Azure Stack HCI experience with S2D and Azure Arc integration.
• NVMe specification internals knowledge (queues, error logs).
• SMBv3 protocol architecture familiarity (SOFS, SWN).
• Deduplication/Compression engine understanding.
• BitLocker encryption interaction with clustered storage.