Distinguished Engineer - AI

NetApp; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 266,050 - 396,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, life, and retirement insurance

Paid time off

Performance-based incentives

Employee stock purchase plan

Restricted stock units (RSU)

Job summary

NetApp in San Jose, California, is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to architect and ship next-generation AI infrastructure. This role involves driving consensus on technical strategies and translating business problems into actionable architectures. You will work closely with the product management and engineering teams to innovate new products for mission-critical AI workloads.

The ideal candidate will possess globally recognized expertise in scalable storage systems, solid experience building enterprise-grade products, and excellent communication skills to liaise with leadership.

Qualifications

• Globally recognized domain expertise in software and system design for highly scalable distributed storage.
• Experience building resilient and scalable enterprise-grade products.
• Excellent communication skills for liaising with executives and senior leadership.

Responsibilities

• Provide the technology strategy to accelerate innovation within NetApp.
• Define the roadmap and long-term vision from business priorities and technology trends.
• Mentor senior and principal engineers and set the technical bar.

Skills

AI Inferencing & ML Systems

Distributed Systems at Scale

AI Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

High-Performance Data Planes

Security & Multi-Tenancy

Cloud-Native Orchestration

Job description

Job Summary

Distinguished Engineer – AI Infrastructure. Architect and ship next‑generation AI infrastructure and inference platform serving millions of requests with stringent latency, throughput, and reliability requirements. Set technical North Star, translate business problems into defensible architectures, drive consensus, shape roadmaps, invent solutions, and turn constraints into competitive moats.

Core Expertise Required

• AI Inferencing & ML Systems – deep hands‑on experience with inference engines (TensorRT, vLLM, ONNX Runtime, Triton), model optimization (quantization, pruning, distillation) and serving patterns for LLMs and computer vision models at scale. Proven track record building and architecting RAG pipelines and optimizing retrieval‑augmented generation workflows for production latency targets.
• Distributed Systems at Scale – 15+ years architecting fault‑tolerant, low‑latency distributed systems. Expert‑level understanding of consensus protocols, distributed state management, data consistency models under partition. Experience with high‑performance filesystems and storage engines optimized for AI workloads.
• AI Infrastructure & Platform Engineering – built enterprise‑grade or SaaS platforms for AI/ML workloads: model registries, feature stores, inference gateways, multi‑tenant serving infrastructure. Deep familiarity with GPU/TPU cluster orchestration, memory hierarchy optimization, heterogeneous compute scheduling.
• High‑Performance Data Planes – designed and implemented high‑throughput, low‑latency networking stacks: RDMA, DPDK, kernel bypass techniques, custom protocols for inter‑service and accelerator‑to‑accelerator communication.
• Security & Multi‑Tenancy – hardened multi‑tenant ML infrastructure with robust isolation, end‑to‑end encryption, key management for model weights, fine‑grained RBAC/ABAC for data scientists and production workloads.
• Cloud‑Native Orchestration – expert in Kubernetes scheduling extensions, device plugins, custom controllers, service mesh for AI microservices, and API gateway patterns for model serving.

About The Team

ONTAP is NetApp’s flagship storage operating system. The ONTAP team drives product strategy, roadmap, and engineering delivery for ONTAP software and systems spanning filesystems, storage, security, networking, and protocols. The solutions are designed to power mission‑critical applications, AI infrastructure, and cloud workflows for Fortune 500 companies.

What You Will Do

• Provide the technology strategy to accelerate innovation within NetApp and the industry.
• Define the roadmap and long‑term vision derived from business priorities, technology trends, and emerging customer use cases.
• Partner with Product Management and engineering to define and deliver next‑generation NetApp products.
• Influence executive management and engineering, acting as a force multiplier across the organization.
• Mentor senior and principal engineers and set the technical bar for senior and principal roles.
• Evangelize internally and externally for owned NetApp products and become an industry authority on related technologies.

What You Will Bring

• Globally recognized domain expertise in software and system design for highly scalable distributed storage, databases, control and data plane architectures for Gen AI and AI‑as‑a‑Service workloads.
• Experience building resilient and scalable enterprise‑grade products.
• Experience building large‑scale, compute‑intensive stateful applications.
• Ownership of product and system architecture for multiple significant projects.
• Expertise in coding, design, architecture, subsystems, and technology trends.
• Excellent communication skills to liaise with executives, senior leadership on products, technology trends and customer issues.

Benefits and Compensation

Target salary: $266,050 – $396,000 USD. Final compensation will vary by location, qualifications, experience, and education. Total compensation packages include health, life, and retirement insurance; paid time off; various leave options; performance‑based incentives; employee stock purchase plan; and/or restricted stock units (RSU) as governed by local regulations. A hybrid working environment is employed; roles generally require some in‑office or in‑person presence, details shared during recruitment.

Equal Opportunity Employer

NetApp is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and complies 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.