Senior AI Software Engineer - Cloud-Native Systems

NetApp, Inc.; San Jose, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 253,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Retirement Plans

Paid Time Off

Job summary

NetApp, Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineer in its AI BU to design and build complex systems, lead key components, and mentor engineers. You will contribute to design and delivery, maintain high technical standards, and stay ahead with new technologies.

The role emphasizes hands-on coding, architectural ownership, and collaboration with product stakeholders in a hybrid work environment. Strong experience with cloud-native architectures and AI/ML systems is preferred.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including some exposure to large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience as technical lead or primary design owner on a project or team-level initiative.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Working knowledge of using agentic engineering using local and/or frontier models.
• Exposure to Distributed Storage Systems.
• Ability to build consensus and communicate technical trade-offs within your team and to adjacent teams.
• Solid system design skills, with experience owning the architecture of a component or service.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills — able to author design docs and clearly present technical trade-offs.
• Experience with data processing, analytics, or AI/ML systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to a team's technical quality bar.
• Familiarity with CI/CD infrastructure for production deployments.

Responsibilities

• Serve as tech lead and/or primary design owner for a project or component within AI BU, driving it from design through delivery.
• Design and build complex, high-quality software systems, owning technical correctness, performance, and maintainability within your area.
• Author design docs/RFCs for your project or team and participate in design reviews for adjacent teams.
• Write production code and review the most complex designs and PRs within your team.
• Partner with your manager/tech lead and product stakeholders to translate requirements into technical designs.
• Mentor and support the growth of less experienced engineers on your team.
• Identify and help resolve technical risk within your area of ownership — technical debt, scalability limits, reliability gaps.
• Contribute to and help enforce best practices in system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence within your team.
• Stay current on new technologies, frameworks, and patterns, and propose adoption where it adds value.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical lead

Cloud-native

Agentic engineering

Distributed storage

Technical communication

AI/ML systems

Mentoring engineers

CI/CD familiarity

Tools

AWS

Azure

Google Cloud

Job description

NetApp, Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineer in its AI BU to design and build complex systems, lead key components, and mentor engineers. You will contribute to design and delivery, maintain high technical standards, and stay ahead with new technologies.

The role emphasizes hands-on coding, architectural ownership, and collaboration with product stakeholders in a hybrid work environment. Strong experience with cloud-native architectures and AI/ML systems is preferred.