Distinguished Engineer - Hyperscalers

NetApp; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 285,000 - 355,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Retirement Plan

Paid Time Off

Employee stock purchase plan

Job summary

NetApp is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to lead architecture for cloud services across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The role focuses on scalable, fault-tolerant control planes and high-velocity development across many teams.

The candidate will mentor engineers, drive innovation, and contribute to IP while delivering complex solutions in a hybrid environment. Strong communication and cloud-native expertise are essential for success.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Extensive experience building fault tolerant and high scale distributed architecture on one of the major cloud providers.
• Experience with 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.

Responsibilities

• Define and deliver architecture for the Cloud business unit across major cloud providers.
• Lead cross-functional engineering projects with independence and impact.
• Promote best engineering, QA, and operational practices across the team.
• Decompose complex problems into simple, scalable solutions and understand system interdependencies.
• Balance stakeholder objectives while mentoring engineers and driving trust with customers.
• Build modern CD/CI infrastructure to support hundreds of developers.
• Design cloud-native QA frameworks and components for scale.
• Coach and mentor senior engineers and contribute to IP through patents.

Skills

Java

Typescript

Python

Ruby

Cloud platforms

DevOps

Monitoring

Security

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

CloudWatch

Datadog

Grafana

Elastic

Kubernetes

Docker

CI/CD

Job description

Own 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. Join teams that innovate to elevate, drive results, and excel together across every function.

Job Summary

We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer (DE) reporting into Cloud Business Unit SVP&GM. Someone in this role will get the opportunity to work on building and scaling NetApp architecture and experience across all three major cloud services—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as NetApp storage is first party integrated into all these three cloud providers. This is a technical leadership role which will require collaborating with other technical leaders and software engineers across NetApp to drive innovation, engineering excellence, and designing scalable architectures. It is expected that someone in this role will work on most complex engineering problems in space of service fundamentals (availability, reliability, performance, and scalability), developer velocity (CD/CI, modern canary, and real user telemetry-based testing) and designing fault tolerant, highly available and low latency control plane architectures. To earn the respect of the NetApp software engineering community and to keep their tools sharp, Distinguished Engineers (DEs) at NetApp are hands‑on practitioners, not consultants. So, it is expected that someone in this role should be able to code and serve as role model for the NetApp technical community. It is expected the person in the role will devote 40% or more of their time in producing artifacts, such as vision statements, design documents, and source code.

Prior experience working as a principal or senior principal engineer in one or more high scale, geo distributed applications or services built on either of the major cloud providers will be highly preferred. Prior experience working on 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 Java, Typescript, Python, or Ruby.
• 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 $285,000-355,000. 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.

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.