Cloud and DevOps engineers. A storage array used to be a box in a company's own data centre. Today the same storage, the same database and the same backup are also sold as a service running inside AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Someone has to build that service, which means automating provisioning, upgrades, scaling, failover and recovery. That is why this is the largest role here, hired several times as often, relative to all hiring, as at a typical product company. It is a builder's job more than an operator's, and the postings require Python, Go and Java as often as Kubernetes and Terraform.

C/C++ systems engineers on Linux. Underneath every managed service sits code that decides exactly how bytes reach a disk and come back. These engineers write storage operating systems and file systems, the storage engines and query executors inside databases, replication between sites, and the data movers that copy a backup out and restore it. This is the second large role, and it is concentrated here as in few other places. The postings require the Linux kernel, drivers, file systems and file-sharing protocols such as SMB and NFS, and they expect long sessions with a debugger such as GDB.

Go backend engineers. Between the low-level engine and the cloud console sit the control services, the APIs that create a volume, schedule a backup or add a database node. Much of that layer is now written in Go, which makes the Go backend engineer a distinctive hire here and far more common than at a typical product company.

Test engineers. Testing a storage system means proving that data survives. Testers pull disks, cut power and check that nothing is lost or corrupted, on real and virtual hardware. Much of the testing here is that kind of system testing, automated in Python, and the rest covers the management software, often in Java. In volume, testing is an ordinary part of the mix, neither unusually large nor small.

GenAI engineers. Their place in this Industry Vertical depends on which part you look at. At the database and warehouse companies, like Teradata, MongoDB and Cloudera, they are a large group. They build features that let people ask questions of their data in plain language, search stored data by meaning rather than by exact words (vector search), and use AI agents to manage databases. The postings require Python, LangChain, vector databases and MCP. At the storage and backup companies, like Cohesity and Nasuni, they are rare.

Data engineers. Most of them work at the warehouse and lakehouse companies, like Databricks and Cloudera, where the product is itself a data platform. The postings require Python, Java, Spark and Kafka.

Also present in small numbers. Full-stack engineers build the management consoles, and firmware engineers work on storage hardware. There are also Software Engineer, Security roles, meaning software engineers who specialise in security and build login systems, cloud and network protections, and the checks that keep code safe. In this Industry Vertical their work is about surviving an attack, through backups that cannot be altered and through spotting ransomware from what it does to stored data.

Rare here. Java, the most common hire at most product companies, appears mainly at the warehouse companies and is otherwise thin. .NET, mobile, SAP and Salesforce barely appear.