Cloud Storage Test Engineer at Western Digital in Rochester, MN

At WD, our vision is to power global innovation and push the boundaries of technology to make what you thought was once impossible, possible.

At our core, WD is a company of problem solvers. People achieve extraordinary things given the right technology. For decades, we’ve been doing just that—our technology helped people put a man on the moon and capture the first-ever picture of a black hole.

We offer an expansive portfolio of technologies, HDDs, and platforms for business, creative professionals, and consumers alike under our Western Digital®, WD®, and WD_BLACK™.

We are a key partner to some of the largest and highest-growth organizations in the world. From enabling systems to make cities safer and more connected, to powering the data centers behind many of the world’s biggest companies and hyperscale cloud providers, to meeting the massive and ever-growing data storage needs of the AI era, WD is fueling a brighter, smarter future.

Today’s exceptional challenges require your unique skills. Together, we can build the future of data storage.

The Storage Test Engineer will serve as a hands-on technical contributor within Western Digital's System Integration & Test (SIT) lab, focused on deploying, operating, and validating clustered storage environments that accurately reflect real-world cloud and datacenter infrastructure. Working closely with the Clustered Storage Test team and HDD System Test groups, this engineer will configure scale-out storage clusters, design and execute various workloads and SLA validation tests, measure and analyze system and drive performance, and monitor drive health telemetry. This role is ideal for an engineer with 2–6 years of experience in storage systems or infrastructure who is ready to go deep on distributed storage behavior, performance characterization, and large-scale fleet operations.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Deploy and operate scale-out storage environments — including multi-node object storage clusters, erasure-coded pools, and rack-level storage deployments — configured to emulate real customer datacenter architectures at lab scale.
• Measure and analyze storage system and drive performance — characterizing throughput, IOPS, and latency distributions across workload profiles including AI/ML data access patterns, backup and restore traffic, cloud object storage, and web-serving workloads — and producing clear performance reports with root-cause observations.
• Identify and investigate performance anomalies by correlating cluster-level metrics with drive-level telemetry, distinguishing between platform bottlenecks, configuration issues, and drive-level contributors to throughput or latency degradation.
• Analyze technical customer workload studies and translate key variables into realistic test scenarios and validation methodologies.
• Instrument and monitor drive health telemetry — collecting and trending SMART attributes, Error Logs,  I/O error rates, and temperature data — to identify early failure indicators and correlate drive health signals with observed cluster performance during long-run experiments.
• Contribute to fleet management processes for the lab's HDD inventory, supporting tracking of drive state, physical location, test assignment, and lifecycle status across large populations of test drives.
• Assist with datacenter infrastructure management tasks including rack-level storage deployments, drive swap procedures, firmware staging, and hardware validation during active cluster tests.
• Document test configurations, performance results, and failure analyses in detailed technical write-ups that allow peer engineers to reproduce experiments, compare results across configurations, and build on prior findings.
• Collaborate with senior engineers to identify gaps between existing test methodologies and modern cloud storage deployment patterns, then help design and implement updated test scenarios, workload mixes, or cluster configurations that close those gaps.
• Evaluate storage benchmarking tools and workload generators, assessing their suitability for emulating specific customer traffic profiles and recommending configurations that produce the most representative and actionable results.

REQUIRED

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 2–6 years of hands-on experience in storage systems, distributed infrastructure, or storage test and validation engineering.
• Familiarity with scale-out storage architectures and an understanding of how distributed object or block storage clusters are structured, scaled, and managed in production environments.
• Exposure to S3-compatible object storage (MinIO, AWS S3, or equivalent), including operational concepts such as bucket management, erasure coding, and performance benchmarking.
• Strong Linux command-line proficiency; comfort working in a physical lab environment with servers, HBAs, JBODs, and storage controllers.
• Solid scripting ability (Python, Bash, or similar) sufficient for automating test execution, parsing results, and building lightweight data-processing utilities.

PREFERRED

• Familiarity with drive health monitoring and telemetry — including SMART attribute collection, error log analysis, and correlating drive-level signals with system-level performance observations.
• Exposure to rack-level storage deployment practices: server racking, HBA and storage controller configuration, JBOD/JBOF cabling and validation.
• Familiarity of erasure coding and how EC parity levels affect storage efficiency, durability, and rebuild performance under drive failure conditions.
• Experience with fleet management concepts or tooling for tracking and auditing large inventories of physical storage devices across a lab or datacenter environment.
• Familiarity with SLA testing methodologies — defining availability and durability targets, instrumenting measurement, and validating cluster behavior against those targets under both normal and degraded conditions.
• Experience with storage benchmarking tools such as Warp, fio, vdbench, or similar workload generators.
• Experience with automation tools like Docker, Ansible, Grafana, etc. 
• Knowledge of distributed storage platforms such as Ceph, HDFS, or similar open-source cluster software.
• Familiarity with datacenter infrastructure management practices including asset lifecycle tracking, capacity planning, and hardware refresh operations.
• Experience building automated test reports or data pipelines that collect, process, and present performance and health metrics from distributed storage systems — including scheduled report generation, results dashboards, or trend-tracking tooling that surfaces patterns across long-run test campaigns.

Western Digital is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster. Our pay transparency policy is available here.

Western Digital thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives results in the best outcomes for our employees, our company, our customers, and the world around us. We are committed to an inclusive environment where every individual can thrive through a sense of belonging, respect and contribution.

Western Digital is committed to offering opportunities to applicants with disabilities and ensuring all candidates can successfully navigate our careers website and our hiring process. Please contact us at jobs.accommodations@wdc.com to advise us of your accommodation request. In your email, please include a description of the specific accommodation you are requesting as well as the job title and requisition number of the position for which you are applying.

Based on our experience, we anticipate that the application deadline will be 08/07/2026 (3 months from posting), although we reserve the right to close the application process sooner if we hire an applicant for this position before the application deadline. If we are not able to hire someone from this role before the application deadline, we will update this posting with a new anticipated application deadline.

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Compensation & Benefits Details

• An employee’s pay position within the salary range may be based on several factors including but not limited to (1) relevant education; qualifications; certifications; and experience; (2) skills, ability, knowledge of the job; (3) performance, contribution and results; (4) geographic location; (5) shift; (6) internal and external equity; and (7) business and organizational needs.
• The salary range is what we believe to be the range of possible compensation for this role at the time of this posting.  We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and this range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in California, Colorado, New York or remote jobs that can be performed in California, Colorado and New York.  This range may be modified in the future.
• If your position is non-exempt, you are eligible for overtime pay pursuant to company policy and applicable laws.  You may also be eligible for shift differential pay, depending on the shift to which you are assigned.

• You will be eligible to be considered for bonuses under either WD’s Short Term Incentive Plan (“STI Plan”) or the Sales Incentive Plan (“SIP”) which provides incentive awards based on Company and individual performance, depending on your role and your performance. You may be eligible to participate in our annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents, pursuant to the terms of the LTI plan. Please note that not all roles are eligible to participate in the LTI program, and not all roles are eligible for equity under the LTI plan. RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires, subject to WD's Standard Terms and Conditions for Restricted Stock Unit Awards.

• We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid vacation time; paid sick leave; medical/dental/vision insurance; life, accident and disability insurance; tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts; employee assistance program; other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity; tuition reimbursement; transit; the Applause Program; employee stock purchase plan; and the WD Savings 401(k) Plan.
• Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.

Notice To Candidates: Please be aware that WD and its subsidiaries will never request payment as a condition for applying for a position or receiving an offer of employment. Should you encounter any such requests, please report it immediately to WD Ethics Helpline or email compliance@wdc.com.