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Distinguished Engineer 7

Job ID 133072 Date posted 01/23/2026 Location San Jose, CA

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.

All internal movements within the Product Group via requisition will be lateral, offering valuable growth opportunities to extend your skills in a new area. Opportunities for a promotion will be reviewed in the normal course of business, aligned with our promotion 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.

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Why NetApp?

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.

If you're ready to innovate, rise to the challenge, and own every moment - make your next move your best one. Apply now.

Apply now

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. We pledge to take every reasonable step to ensure that our applicants and employees are respected, treated fairly, and with dignity. See the EEO poster. NetApp makes reasonable accommodations, consistent with applicable laws, for religious purposes and for the known physical or mental limitations of an otherwise qualified applicant or employee with a disability, who can perform the essential job functions unless undue hardship would result.

Reasonable accommodation

If you are an applicant with a physical or mental disability that requires reasonable accommodation for any part of our application process, please email accessibility@netapp.com. Each request for reasonable accommodation will be considered on a case-by-case basis, consistent with applicable laws and regulations. Please note, this email address is only for accommodation requests; we do not accept unsolicited resumes.

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Note to agencies

We’re sorry, but we cannot accept unsolicited resumes that are sent to NetApp employees or contractors. We will not compensate for a referral without a current contract on file with our Talent Acquisition team. If you’re interested in helping us with a particular role, please call your partner in Talent Acquisition to discuss.