Principal AI Systems Architect

NetApp; San Jose (CA); Hybrid; USD 196,000 - 293,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Retirement Plan

Paid Time Off

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Restricted Stock Units

Job summary

NetApp is seeking a Principal Engineer in the AI BU to serve as a senior technical authority, architecting cross‑team initiatives at the intersection of storage, data, and AI. You will influence architecture and drive complex design decisions while remaining hands‑on as an IC.

You will mentor engineers, set technical direction, and ensure architecture coherence across multiple teams, balancing innovation with pragmatic execution.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of hands‑on software engineering experience, including designing and building large‑scale distributed systems.
• Technical lead or architect on multi‑team or org‑wide initiatives.
• Deep hands‑on experience with cloud‑native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Hands‑on experience with Distributed Storage Systems.
• Proven ability to build technical consensus and influence engineering direction across teams without formal authority.
• Strong system design skills with ownership of highly available, low‑latency services.
• Experience with data processing, analytics, and AI/ML systems.

Responsibilities

• Serve as technical architect or tech lead across major AI BU initiatives, owning end‑to‑end system design.
• Set technical direction and design standards across several teams to ensure architecture coherence.
• Drive cross‑cutting technical problems to well‑reasoned solutions with design docs/RFCs.
• Stay hands‑on: write production code, review critical designs, and unblock engineering issues.
• Translate business priorities into technical roadmaps and architecture decisions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar without formal management authority.
• Identify and drive resolution of architectural debt, scalability bottlenecks, and reliability gaps.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical lead

Cloud-native

AI/ML systems

CI/CD pipelines

Mentoring

Design docs

Cross-team influence

Performance & reliability

Job description

NetApp is seeking a Principal Engineer in the AI BU to serve as a senior technical authority, architecting cross‑team initiatives at the intersection of storage, data, and AI. You will influence architecture and drive complex design decisions while remaining hands‑on as an IC.

You will mentor engineers, set technical direction, and ensure architecture coherence across multiple teams, balancing innovation with pragmatic execution.