A system and method are provided for facilitating efficient management of data structures stored in remote memory. During operation, the system receives a request to allocate memory for a first part in a data structure stored in a remote memory associated with a compute node in a network. The system pre-allocates a buffer in the remote memory for a plurality of parts in the data structure and stores a first local descriptor associated with the buffer in a local worker table stored in a volatile memory of the compute node. The first local descriptor facilitates servicing future access requests to the first and other parts in the data structure. The system stores a first global descriptor for the buffer in a shared global table stored in the remote memory and generates a first reference corresponding to the first part, thereby facilitating faster traversals of the data structure.