Job Summary

VP of Engineering, Reliability & Quality

The Opportunity 

Quality and speed are colliding — NetApp ships across ONTAP and adjacent products at a pace where quality-as-a-downstream-checkpoint no longer holds, and customers increasingly hold us to the same reliability bar as hyperscalers. As VP of Engineering for Reliability & Quality, you’ll own Escalations, Release Engineering, and System Test, with a mandate that reaches further: defining and driving the quality motion — the standards, gates, and metrics — that shape how every engineering team, not just yours, builds and ships. 

This is a build-and-lead role for someone who wants to own outcomes they don’t fully control: direct authority over release gates and escalation resolution, paired with the credibility and influence to raise the quality bar across teams that report elsewhere. 

Job Requirements

Role: 

Reports to: SVP of Platform Engineering 

Location: This role will be based in San Jose, CA. While San Jose is strongly preferred, we are open to considering remote candidates for the right individual. Given that our senior leadership team is based in San Jose, we expect this leader to spend meaningful time there.

Scope: Leads Escalations, Release Engineering, and System Test directly — an organization of roughly 300 engineers. The org-wide quality-motion mandate extends by influence across engineering teams outside this reporting line. 

What You’ll Own 

The executive escalation process end to end — triage, drive resolution of, and communicate status on the highest-severity customer-impacting issues, partnering with the engineering teams that own the underlying code and with Support and field organizations. 

Release engineering — build, packaging, qualification, and release gating — using release gates as the primary enforcement mechanism for quality standards across engineering. 

System test — integration testing, performance and scale testing, longevity testing, and customer-specific testing — validating the product as a whole, above and beyond the unit and functional testing that dev teams own directly. 

The definition and evolution of NetApp’s org-wide quality motion: the standards, metrics (e.g., escape rate, defect density, time-to-resolution, release health), and processes that hold engineering leadership accountable to them. 

Root-cause analysis and systemic prevention programs, so recurring failure patterns surfaced through escalations and releases feed back into engineering practice rather than one-off fixes. 

CI/CD quality gates and the central test infrastructure and tooling that System Test uses to validate releases across engineering organizations. 

Building, developing, and retaining a high-performing, multi-layered engineering leadership team across Escalations, Release Engineering, and System Test — with real focus on sustainable team health, not just delivery velocity. 

Close partnership with Support, Product Management, and peer engineering leaders to keep quality standards coherent across the full customer-facing lifecycle, from pre-release qualification through post-release escalation. 

A voice in executive technical strategy and release planning, providing the quality and risk perspective on major releases and roadmap decisions.

What we are looking For

Required 

15+ years of engineering leadership in infrastructure or systems software, including 8+ years leading multiple layers of engineering management. 

A track record owning quality, reliability, escalations, or release engineering at scale for a complex, multi-product platform. 

Experience leading large-scale, executive-visibility customer escalations to resolution, including cross-org coordination with Support and field teams. 

A track record of driving adoption of standards or metrics across engineering teams outside your reporting line — leading through influence, not just authority. 

Excellent executive communication — you can represent quality and risk tradeoffs clearly to senior leadership during release decisions. 

Strongly Preferred 

Deep familiarity with release engineering practice — build/release pipelines, qualification gates, CI/CD — for complex systems software. 

Experience building or scaling system test organizations — integration, performance/scale, longevity, or customer-specific testing. 

Experience restructuring or right-sizing engineering teams based on evidence rather than assumption. 

A leadership style grounded in developing others, not positional authority.

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.