Distinguished Engineer- AI
About The Position
NetApp’s ONTAP team drives product strategy, roadmaps, and engineering delivery for its flagship storage operating system. The Distinguished Engineer develops innovative solutions and architecture for ONTAP software and systems across filesystems and storage, security, networking, and protocols. These solutions support mission-critical applications, AI infrastructure, and cloud workflows for Fortune 500 companies. The role leads architecture and delivery of next-generation AI infrastructure and an inference platform designed to serve millions of requests with demanding latency, throughput, and reliability requirements. The Distinguished Engineer sets technical direction by translating business problems into architectures, building consensus, shaping roadmaps, and creating solutions where standard approaches are insufficient. The position also provides technology strategy, influences product and engineering priorities, mentors senior and principal engineers, and represents NetApp’s products and domain expertise internally and externally.
Requirements
- Globally recognized domain expertise in software and system design for highly scalable distributed storage and databases, including control- and data-plane architectures for large-scale Gen AI and AI-as-a-Service workloads.
- Experience building highly resilient, scalable, enterprise-grade products.
- Experience building large-scale, compute-intensive stateful applications.
- Expertise in coding, design, architecture, subsystems, and technology trends.
- Excellent communication skills, including communicating about products, technology trends, and customer issues with executives and senior leadership.
- Deep hands-on experience with high-performance inference engines such as TensorRT, vLLM, ONNX Runtime, or Triton.
- Experience with model optimization techniques including quantization, pruning, and distillation, and with serving LLMs and computer vision models at scale.
- Proven track record building and architecting production RAG pipelines and optimizing retrieval-augmented generation workflows for latency targets.
- 15+ years architecting fault-tolerant, low-latency distributed systems.
- Expert-level understanding of consensus protocols, distributed state management, and data consistency models under partition.
- Experience with high-performance filesystems and storage engines optimized for AI workloads, including checkpoints, model artifacts, and training datasets.
- Experience building enterprise-grade or SaaS platforms for AI/ML workloads, such as model registries, feature stores, inference gateways, and multi-tenant serving infrastructure.
- Deep familiarity with GPU/TPU cluster orchestration, memory hierarchy optimization, and heterogeneous compute scheduling.
- Experience designing and implementing high-throughput, low-latency networking stacks for critical data paths.
- Expertise in RDMA, DPDK, kernel-bypass techniques, and custom protocols for inter-service and accelerator-to-accelerator communication.
- Experience hardening multi-tenant ML infrastructure with isolation, end-to-end encryption, key management for model weights, and fine-grained RBAC/ABAC.
- Expertise in Kubernetes scheduling extensions, including device plugins and custom controllers, service mesh for AI microservices, and API gateway patterns for model serving.
Responsibilities
- Provide technology strategy to accelerate innovation within NetApp and the industry.
- Define roadmaps and long-term vision based on business priorities, technology and competitive trends, and emerging customer use cases.
- Partner with Product Management and Engineering to define and deliver next-generation NetApp products.
- Influence executive management and engineering to contribute to a competitive portfolio.
- Act as a force multiplier across NetApp engineers.
- Mentor senior and principal engineers and raise the technical bar for senior and principal technical roles.
- Evangelize owned NetApp products internally and externally and become an industry-recognized authority in related technologies and domains.
- Architect and deliver next-generation AI infrastructure and inference platforms for large-scale workloads.
- Own product and system architecture for multiple significant projects.
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package, which may include health insurance, life insurance, retirement or pension plans, paid time off, leave options, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stock units; offerings vary by region and are subject to local laws, regulations, and company policies.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
