Principal Engineer, AI BU

NetApp, Inc.•Durham, NC

5d•$227,800 - $338,800

About The Position

As a Principal Engineer in NetApp's AI BU, you will serve as a senior technical authority, architecting and tech-leading complex, cross-team initiatives and setting technical direction for products at the intersection of storage, data, and AI. You will address challenging design and architecture problems through technical depth and influence rather than management authority, while maintaining a hands-on individual-contributor focus. You will own end-to-end system design for major initiatives, set standards across engineering teams, and resolve ambiguous cross-cutting problems. The role includes writing production code, reviewing critical designs and pull requests, partnering with engineering and product leadership on roadmaps, mentoring engineers, identifying and resolving systemic technical risks, representing AI BU engineering in technical reviews, championing engineering best practices, and evaluating new technologies and architecture patterns.

Requirements

12 or more years of hands-on software engineering experience, including designing and building large-scale distributed systems.
Demonstrated experience as a technical lead or architect on multi-team or organization-wide initiatives.
Deep hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Experience using agentic engineering with local and/or frontier models.
Hands-on experience with distributed storage systems.
Ability to build technical consensus and influence engineering direction across teams without formal authority.
Strong system design skills and direct ownership of architecture for highly available, low-latency, large-scale services.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including authoring design documents/RFCs and presenting technical trade-offs to engineers and executives.
Experience with data processing, analytics, and AI/ML systems.
Track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical quality across teams.
Experience building CI/CD infrastructure for large-scale deployments.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
Domain expertise in knowledge graphs, semantics, and data modeling.
Hands-on experience with distributed database systems.
Hands-on experience training and deploying AI models.
Hands-on experience with GPU workloads and accelerated computing infrastructure.

Responsibilities

Serve as technical architect and/or tech lead across major AI BU initiatives, owning system design end-to-end.
Set technical direction and design standards across multiple engineering teams and ensure architectural coherence.
Drive ambiguous, cross-cutting technical problems to well-reasoned solutions, authoring design documents and RFCs to align stakeholders.
Write production code, review high-stakes designs and pull requests, and unblock difficult engineering problems.
Partner with engineering and product leadership to translate business priorities into technical roadmaps and architecture decisions.
Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across teams without formal management authority.
Identify architectural debt, scalability bottlenecks, reliability gaps, and other systemic technical risks, and drive them to resolution.
Represent AI BU engineering in cross-functional and executive technical reviews, communicating trade-offs and recommendations.
Champion best practices in system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence.
Evaluate and introduce technologies, frameworks, and architectural patterns, balancing innovation with pragmatism.