Principal Engineer, Data Path / Metadata / Performance (StorageGRID)
About The Position
NetApp is hiring a Principal Engineer for its StorageGRID team to own the architecture, technical direction, and end-to-end performance of the StorageGRID S3 data path, including metadata. The role focuses on object storage for AI data lakes, analytics, and large-scale enterprise environments, including deployments spanning hundreds of nodes and exabytes of capacity. The Principal Engineer will serve as the technical authority for how StorageGRID moves and serves data, addressing complex performance and scaling problems. This is a deeply hands-on technical leadership role requiring architectural judgment and influence across engineering, quality assurance, product management, support, and field teams. The engineer will lead cross-cutting initiatives from architecture through implementation, validation, and release readiness, while mentoring engineers and setting engineering standards.
Requirements
- 12+ years of experience in systems, storage, distributed systems, or performance engineering, with a track record of technical leadership.
- Strong hands-on programming skills in one or more of C/C++, Go, or Python.
- Experience debugging distributed software in Linux-based environments.
- Experience building or owning an object storage system, S3 implementation, or large-scale distributed storage/database product, including request data path, data placement, replication or erasure coding, consistency, and failure handling.
- Experience with Apache Cassandra or comparable distributed databases at scale.
- Ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with S3 protocol semantics, including multipart, versioning, and Object Lock/WORM, and their data path implications.
- Experience with load balancing, networking, storage media (NVMe/SSD/HDD), and x86 hardware.
- Experience with AI-assisted development and observability tooling for analysis, debugging, testing, and documentation.
Responsibilities
- Own the architecture and technical implementation of the StorageGRID S3 data path, including ingest, retrieve, delete, metadata storage, and on-disk replicated or erasure-coded data flows.
- Lead performance analysis and benchmarking, identify performance improvements, and deliver them.
- Design for scale and geo-distribution, including multi-site operation, cross-grid replication, and global or federated namespace behavior at hundreds of nodes and exabyte scale.
- Drive large, cross-cutting data path initiatives from architecture through implementation, validation, and release readiness.
- Stay hands-on in code and complex bugs; set technical standards through design, reviews, root-cause analysis, and pragmatic engineering practices.
- Lead StorageGRID designs and drive architectural alignment across data path engineering.
- Mentor Senior and MTS engineers on data path internals, performance optimization, distributed-systems design, and debugging practices.
- Collaborate with quality engineering, product management, supportability, support, and field teams to translate customer requirements into data path and performance improvements.
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, subject to regional variations and 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
