Senior Engineer, AI BU

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

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance

Life Insurance

Retirement or Pension Plans

Paid Time Off

Stock purchase plan

Job summary

NetApp, Inc. is seeking a Senior Engineer in its AI BU to drive design and delivery of complex software components. You’ll lead technically, mentor teammates, and contribute to scalable architectures, working hands-on on production-grade AI/ML systems.

The role emphasizes ownership of design, performance, and reliability, with collaboration across product stakeholders. Hybrid work and competitive benefits are offered.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience as technical lead or primary design owner on initiatives.
• Hands-on cloud-native experience on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Experience with data processing, analytics, or AI/ML systems.
• Strong written and verbal communication; ability to author design docs.

Responsibilities

• Serve as tech lead or design owner for a project within AI BU.
• Design and build complex software systems with emphasis on correctness and performance.
• Author design docs/RFCs and participate in design reviews.
• Write production code and review complex designs and PRs.
• Translate requirements into technical designs with stakeholders.
• Mentor engineers and support team growth.
• Identify and mitigate technical risks like debt and scalability gaps.
• Contribute to best practices in design, testing, observability, and operations.
• Stay current with new technologies and propose valuable adoptions.

Skills

Technical leadership

Distributed systems

Cloud-native architectures

AI/ML systems

Communication

System design

CI/CD

Data processing

Tools

CI/CD

Job description

Job Summary

As a Senior Engineer in NetApp's AI BU, you are a strong, trusted technical contributor — designing and building complex systems within your team while beginning to extend your influence beyond it. You bring deep hands-on expertise to the hardest problems your team faces, are trusted to lead the design and delivery of significant components or projects, and mentor engineers around you. You retain a hands-on, individual-contributor focus.

Key Responsibilities

As a Senior Engineer, you will:

• 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.

Key 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Distributed Database Systems.
• Experience with training and deploying AI models.
• Experience with GPU workloads and accelerated computing infrastructure.

Compensation:
The target salary range for this position is 170,000 - 253,000 USD. 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
• various Leave options
• Performance-Based Incentives
• employee stock purchase plan
• 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.