Cluster & Systems Capacity Engineer

About Backblaze

Backblaze is the object storage leader in the open cloud movement, fueling customer success with cloud storage built purposefully to unlock budgets, unburden administrators, and unleash innovators. Together with our partners, we’re helping customers break free from the restrictive, overpriced legacy solutions that hold them back, and blaze forward with the full power of the open cloud in their hands.

Founded in 2007, we scaled the business with less than $3 million in outside funding until 2021, when we did a traditional IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Today, Backblaze generates over $100m in revenue and is the leading specialized storage cloud - managing over three billion gigabytes of data storage for 500K+ customers in 175+ countries, including businesses, developers, IT professionals, and individuals.

But while there is a lot to celebrate in our past, there is almost as much opportunity ahead of us. Backblaze is seeking a highly analytical, systems-oriented Cluster & Systems Capacity Engineer to drive the planning, forecasting, deployment, and optimization of hardware infrastructure across our global cloud storage platform.

About the Role

This role ensures that Backblaze’s storage clusters, compute systems, and network infrastructure scale reliably, cost-efficiently, and ahead of demand. You will build and maintain predictive models, ensure consistent supply and demand alignment, and partner cross-functionally to inform strategic investment and deployment decisions. This is a high-impact role within Cloud Operations, directly contributing to service availability, durability, performance, margin optimization, and long-term platform scalability.

Key Responsibilities

Capacity Planning & Forecasting

• Develop and maintain short, medium, and long-term capacity demand and hardware deployment forecasts across storage, compute, and network domains within the platform
• Build predictive models that translate business demand signals into infrastructure requirements using historical utilization, growth trends, product sales plans, hardware lifecycle roadmaps, and other key business inputs
• Partner with Infrastructure, Production, and Network Engineering teams to align capacity plans with system design and scaling initiatives
• Develop and automate forecasting pipelines, simulation calculators and tools, and capacity dashboards to improve data quality, reduce manual analysis, and provide stakeholders clear visibility into platform usage and cluster health metrics

Cluster Performance & Resource Optimization

• Monitor and analyze cluster and system-level utilization and performance across CPU, memory, IOPS, and network resources
• Adjust deployment plans and recommended configurations in real-time to maintain adequate headroom and system stability in support of delivering a world-class customer experience
• Partner with service and platform owners to develop headroom and live buffer policies, optimize hardware BoMs, leverage virtualized orchestration, and reduce product cost

Cross-functional Organizational Alignment

• Work in lockstep with Operations and Finance peers to align capacity plans and hardware requirements with capital budgets, cost targets, and financial outcomes
• Support strategic optimization initiatives across infrastructure investments, engineering development, and operations processes, contributing to long-term infrastructure strategy and capital planning
• Lead efforts to evaluate, procure, and provision requests for new or additional hardware, working with Systems and Network Engineering, SRE, NOC, and Data Center Operations teams to identify and deliver optimal solutions