Director, Software Engineer, Customer Success

NetApp; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work model

Job summary

NetApp is seeking a Senior/Principal Data Processing Engineer - OSS to advance the DataPelago engine, integrating open-source platforms like Apache Gluten, Velox, Spark, and Flink. You will lead a team, drive AI-assisted product validation, and collaborate with customers to ensure scalable, reliable deployments across cloud and on-prem environments.

You will mentor engineers, engage with OSS communities, and help shape a category-defining data processing platform within a hybrid work setup at

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field; Master’s preferred.
• 12+ years of production software development and 5+ years in enterprise software support.
• 10+ years building and supporting data processing pipelines on Spark-based platforms.
• Proven track record in customer-facing enterprise software support and leadership.
• Strong cloud deployment experience across SaaS, VM, container, and serverless models.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of engineers for data engineering and analytics applications.
• Advance OSS integrations with Spark, Flink, and related frameworks for DataPelago.
• Ensure success in deployments through validation, monitoring, and support.
• Engage customers across adoption lifecycle and establish quality metrics.
• Drive AI-assisted capabilities and improve release velocity and code quality.
• Collaborate with product, sales, and customer success teams.
• Maintain high standards for data accuracy, performance, and security.

Skills

Leadership

Customer engagement

Data pipelines

Cloud deployments

Spark experience

Automation and tooling

Education

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

Apache Spark

Apache Flink

Velox

Gluten

Job description

Job Summary

DataPelago is at the forefront of revolutionizing data processing for traditional analytics and cutting-edge GenAI preprocessing. We are building an innovative data processing engine that is transforming how Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Ray and others operate on diverse, large-scale data. Our team of engineers drive and adopt advances in hardware-accelerated computing, parallel processing of large-scale data, query optimization, distributed systems, compilers, machine learning, and cloud-native computing. We are looking for specialists to join our engineering team and shape the future of accelerated data processing.

DataPelago Nucleus is a universal data processing engine that is designed to accelerate the processing of diverse data – structured through unstructured – with any parallel processing framework – e.g., Apache Spark – on any infrastructure – including vectorized CPU and GPU. DataPelago Accelerator for Spark (DPA-S), our product based on DataPelago Nucleus, is running large-scale production applications of many globally renowned customers.

The Opportunity:

As a Senior/Principal Data Processing Engineer - OSS, you will be a key individual contributor in adopting and advancing capabilities of open-source software (OSS) platforms such as Apache Gluten, Velox, Apache Spark, and Apache Flink in the context of DataPelago’s data processing engine. You will enhance functional breadth, performance, scale, and reliability of the DataPelago engine through downstream and upstream contributions. You will have the opportunity to engage with community working on these platforms. This is a unique opportunity to make a significant impact on a category-defining product and work with a talented team of engineers.

What You'll Do:

• Lead and grow a talented team of engineers with expertise in the development, operations, tuning, and support of data engineering, data preparation, and analytics applications leveraging massively parallel data processing platforms.

• Drive development with technical leads to implement and deliver industry-leading automated and AI-assisted capabilities for product validation, diagnosing functional and performance anomalies, tuning and optimizing applications for DataPelago’s data processing platform.

• Ensure customer success in their deployment and usage of DataPelago data processing platform through comprehensive preventive, proactive, and responsive product validation and product support.

• Engage customers across their adoption lifecycle.

• Establish metrics including for product quality and support quality; lead the team in ensuring these metrics are continuously improved and achieved in customer deployments.

• Continuously improve software development lifecycle practices leveraging the latest AI advances for higher code quality, release velocity, and productivity.

• Execute efficiently to meet customer success objectives, aligned with organization goals and priorities.

• Lead by example and foster a high-performance, high-integrity, collaborative work culture.

• Collaborate and partner effectively with other engineering, product management, customer success, and sales teams.

What You'll Bring:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field. Master’s preferred.

• 12+ years of production software development and support experience with 5+ years of experience managing enterprise software support.

• 10+ years of experience in developing and supporting data processing pipelines for applications such as data engineering, data preparation, and analytics platforms and their underlying data processing platforms for customer production deployments. Experience with Apache Spark based products and pipelines preferred.

• Track record of stellar customer support; deep experience in managing support teams, tools, and processes for global enterprise software support.

• Technical and process rigor in validating data accuracy, high performance, reliability, and security capabilities of enterprise data processing products or pipelines.

• Ability to attract, retain, and grow exceptional talent in data processing platform and pipeline development, validation, and support.

• Solid understanding of the architecture, deployment, and operations of data processing products and pipelines in the cloud – in SaaS, VM-based, container-based, and serverless scenarios. Experience with GCP, AWS, and their Apache Spark related offerings preferred.

• Excellent judgment on data product validation, enterprise software support, AI adoption, and people management. Strong leadership skills in all these areas.

• Excellent skills engaging with customers, product management, sales, and executive management.

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We are all about helping customers turn challenges into business opportunity. It starts with bringing new thinking to age-old problems, like how to use data most effectively to run better - but also to innovate. We tailor our approach to the customer's unique needs with a combination of fresh thinking and proven approaches.

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.

AI Disclosure

For select roles, some stages of our hiring process may use artificial intelligence tools to help evaluate applications and candidate selection. These tools support—rather than replace—human decision-making.