Senior Data Storage Specialist

As a Senior Data Storage Specialist, you design, implement, and maintain the storage infrastructure that houses an organization's data. This includes SAN/NAS systems, object storage, cloud storage services, backup and recovery solutions, and storage area networking. The senior title means you're making architectural decisions about storage strategy, capacity planning, and technology selection.

Your day balances proactive architecture with reactive troubleshooting. You might spend the morning planning a storage expansion project, then investigate a performance degradation on a production volume, then evaluate cloud storage options for a new workload. You need deep knowledge of storage technologies (block, file, object), storage protocols (iSCSI, NFS, FC), and the ability to translate business requirements into storage solutions.

The pressure point is capacity and cost. Data volumes grow relentlessly, and storage costs can become the largest line item in an IT budget. You're constantly optimizing — tiering data to the right storage class, implementing deduplication and compression, retiring unused volumes, and forecasting when you'll need more capacity. The best storage specialists prevent outages through planning and save money through optimization.