In the early days of Redpanda, formerly known as Vectorized, the author joined the Core team to develop a tiered storage architecture from scratch, enabling cloud storage for the company's core product. This tiered storage feature, built on the Seastar framework, offloads data to the cloud to reduce storage costs while allowing infinite data retention with strong performance. The author highlights the rewarding nature of working on this project, which integrates storage and edge computing by enabling Remote Read Replicas for data distribution across geographic locations. The engineering culture at Redpanda offers significant freedom and ownership, allowing team members to impact the software development process. The company is expanding its team, offering benefits such as unlimited vacation days, and invites interested individuals to explore their open roles and engage with the Redpanda community.