Distinguished Engineer
San Jose, California, United States
Overview
At NetApp, we have a history of helping customers turn challenges into business opportunities. That’s because we bring new thinking to age-old problems, like how to use data most effectively in the most efficient possible way. As an Engineer with NetApp, you’ll have the opportunity to work with modern cloud and container orchestration technologies in a production setting. You’ll play an important role in scaling systems sustainably through automation and evolving them by pushing for changes to improve reliability and velocity.
Success profile
Ready to be an engineer at NetApp? Explore the traits that can help you thrive.
- Analytical
- Adaptable
- Communicator
- Detail-oriented
- Quick-thinking
- Problem solver
Responsibilities
San Jose, California, United States Job category: Software Engineering Job ID: 133073-en_USOwn Every Moment at NetApp
At NetApp, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud.
Ready to innovate and contribute to our path to $10B? Here, you'll collaborate with passionate teams, tackle real-world challenges, and see your impact in how customers transform and grow. If you're ready to bring curiosity, creativity, and drive to every moment, NetApp is where your journey begins.
Job Summary
We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer who will have the opportunity to work on building and scaling architecture and experience across multiple cloud environments, leveraging open-source technologies and delivering platform-as-a-service solutions that power mission-critical workloads.
This is a technical leadership role that requires close collaboration with other technical leaders and software engineers to drive innovation, engineering excellence, and the design of scalable architectures. The role will focus on solving the most complex engineering challenges in areas such as service fundamentals—availability, reliability, performance, and scalability—while also improving developer velocity through modern CI/CD practices, canary deployments, and real-user telemetry-based testing. A key responsibility will be designing fault-tolerant, highly available, and low-latency control plane architectures for cloud-native services. Distinguished Engineers are hands-on practitioners, not consultants. To earn the respect of the engineering community and keep their skills sharp, it is expected that this role will involve coding and serving as a role model for technical excellence. At least forty percent of the time will be devoted to producing tangible artifacts such as vision statements, design documents, and source code.
Prior experience as a Principal or Senior Principal engineer working on high-scale, geo-distributed applications or services built on major cloud providers is highly preferred. Experience with open-source technologies such as Apache Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, or similar distributed systems is strongly valued. Familiarity with storage systems is preferred but not mandatory.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the definition, design, architecture quality, implementation, and delivery of the most advanced, most difficult, most cross-cutting, and/or most ambiguous challenges spanning across the Cloud business unit.
- Operate with independence and act as force multipliers to the benefit of the company, delivering on its most complex challenges.
- Foster a culture of learning and experimentation, and advocate for best engineering, QA, and Operational practices for the entire business unit.
- Serve as a technical leader on demanding, cross-functional engineering projects. The expectation will be to functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions and fully understand system interdependencies and limitation.
- Understand not just the technical and product capabilities but the nuances of the NetApp cloud business and help to understand and balance conflicting stakeholder objectives, while simultaneously building trust and demonstrating empathy with customers’ needs.
- Architect and build modern CD/CI infrastructure which works all the time for several hundred developers working on multitude of interconnected software deployment pipelines.
- Architect and design modern, cloud native QA framework and components.
- Assist in the career development of others, actively coach and mentor other senior and principal engineers on advanced technical issues.
- Contribute to building intellectual property through patents.
Job Requirements
- Minimum of 10+ years of experience as software engineer.
- 4+ years hands-on experience as a senior Principal Engineer leading multiple software engineering teams.
- Expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
- Expert in designing and building large-scale systems in a multi-tiered, distributed environment (Service Oriented Architecture).
- Extensive experience building fault tolerant and high scale distributed architecture on one of the major cloud providers.
- Extensive experience of cloud native application or services operations, data management, migration, and security.
- Excellent communication and writing skills, with the ability to effectively engage with customers, stakeholders, and the engineering community.
- Proactive and self-driven, with the ability to work independently and take ownership of initiatives.
- Experience operating and troubleshooting reliable, scalable software systems.
- Experience building fully automated testing frameworks from code check-in to deployment.
- Proficient in at least one modern programming language such as Rust, GoLang or Java.
- Prior experience building services or applications in cloud-native architectures using either AWS, Azure, or Google cloud.
- Experience with monitoring frameworks (such as CloudWatch, Datadog, Grafana, Elastic or similar).
- Decent understanding of storage architectures, design patterns, and best practices. Preferred will be experience with storage technologies such as RAID, Volumes, Replication solutions.
- Assist in the career development of others, actively coach and mentor other senior and principal engineers on advanced technical issues.
- Contribute to building intellectual property through patents.
Education
Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field or equivalent experience.
Compensation:
The target salary range for this position is $290,000-350,000. The salary offered will be determined by the candidate's location, qualifications, experience, and education and may be outside of this range. Final compensation packages are competitive and in line with industry standards, reflecting a variety of factors, and include a comprehensive benefits package. This may cover Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Retirement or Pension Plans, Paid Time Off (PTO), various Leave options, Performance-Based Incentives, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stocks (RSU’s), with all offerings subject to regional variations and governed by local laws, regulations, and company policies. Benefits may vary by country and region, and further details will be provided as part of the recruitment process.
At NetApp, we embrace a hybrid working environment designed to strengthen connection, collaboration, and culture for all employees. This means that most roles will have some level of in-office and/or in-person expectations, which will be shared during the recruitment process.
Equal Opportunity Employer:
NetApp is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination based on age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability or genetic information, pregnancy, protected veteran status, and any other protected classification.
Why You'll Thrive at NetApp
At NetApp, you won't wait for the perfect moment—you'll make it. The early planning, the extra thought, the bold idea that turns good into great: That's how our people operate and how we continue to push the boundaries of data infrastructure.
NetApp is the trusted partner for organizations transforming data into opportunity. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, we empower customers to run everything from traditional workloads to enterprise AI with unmatched performance, resilience, and security.
Our culture
We celebrate mold breakers, bold thinkers, and problem solvers. We reward initiative, impact, and ownership. We provide flexibility so you can balance professional ambition with your personal life. Here, differences are not just welcomed—they drive everything we do.
If you're ready to innovate, rise to the challenge, and own every moment - make your next move your best one. Apply now.
Submitting an application
To ensure a streamlined and fair hiring process for all candidates, our team only reviews applications submitted through our company website. This practice allows us to track, assess, and respond to applicants efficiently. Emailing our employees, recruiters, or Human Resources personnel directly will not influence your application.
Our values
Put the customer at the center. Care for each other and our communities. Think and act like owners. Build belonging every day. Embrace a growth mindset.
Benefits
Volunteer time off
40 hours of paid volunteer time each year.
Well-being
Employee Assistance Program, fitness, and mental health resources to help employees be their best.
Time away
Paid time off for vacation and to recharge.
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Equal Opportunity Employer*
NetApp is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination based on age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability or genetic information, pregnancy, protected veteran status and any other protected classification. We pledge to take every reasonable step to ensure that our applicants and employees are respected, treated fairly and with dignity. See the EEO poster, Know your rights poster, and NetApp EEO policy. NetApp makes reasonable accommodations, consistent with applicable laws, for religious purposes and for the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified applicant or employee with a disability, who can perform the essential job functions unless undue hardship would result.
State-specific postings/notices to applicants regarding contract compliance can be found here in English and here in Spanish, and fair employment practice information can be found here.
Reasonable Accommodations
At NetApp, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and accessible workplace where individuals with disabilities can thrive. In alignment with our values, NetApp provides reasonable accommodations and adjustments where possible to qualified applicants and employees with disabilities, in accordance with employment rights and regulations relevant to their country of employment, to ensure equal access to employment opportunities and job performance.
Applicants who would like to request an accommodation or adjustment are encouraged to Contact Us. Each request will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, in accordance with applicable laws and our commitment to equity and belonging within our culture, values and business practices. Requests will be handled confidentially and respectfully, and we will work collaboratively to identify effective solutions.
- For reasonable accommodations in Germany, click here.
- For reasonable accommodations in France, click here.
- For reasonable accommodations in The Netherlands, click here.
Please note that we do not accept unsolicited resumes to the above email address.
Data privacy
We care about your privacy and, therefore, ask that you read our Candidate Privacy Notice before you submit any personal information to us.
NetApp does not carry out any solely automated decision making (i.e. the process of making a decision by automated means without any human involvement) in determining your suitability or eligibility for specific roles.
However, the processing of your personal information is carried out with the aid of manual and automated tools. In particular, NetApp may use an automated employment evaluation tool or similar tool as one of several tools, actions, and/or steps to assist with NetApp’s review of candidate applications for various hiring needs. Currently, when addressing certain hiring needs, NetApp uses the Eightfold tool which can provide an initial ranking of a candidate’s skills and experience, based on information provided by the applicant in the application and/or supporting documentation, in comparison to the NetApp designated key requirements of a specific role. Additionally, the tool may be used to help review and/or rank internal employees seeking promotion or other internal mobility. However, our talent acquisition team or our recruiters will ultimately select the candidates for further consideration, following human review of any automated evaluation results and associated underlying documentation (or lack thereof) submitted with the candidates’ application.
An independent audit of the Eightfold Matching Model tool can be found at https://eightfold.ai/nyc-eightfoldmatching-model.
Candidates may request an alternative selection process which will not be subject to the Eightfold matching tool or to any electronic automated employment evaluation by contacting NetApp at careers@netapp.com. To bypass the Eightfold matching tool or any electronic automated employment evaluation, you must include a resume and job ID with your email to careers@netapp.com and you must include in the subject line of your email: Data Privacy Request. Candidates who have questions or want to request additional information on the source of data, type of data, and/or collection of data related to the candidate review process should contact NetApp at careers@netapp.com
Submitting an application
To ensure a streamlined and fair hiring process for all candidates, our team reviews applications submitted through our company website only. This practice allows us to track, assess, and respond to applicants efficiently. Emailing our employees, recruiters, or Human Resources personnel directly will not influence your application.