Principal Performance Architect - ONTAP

NetApp, Inc. • San Jose, CA

11d • $227,800 - $338,800

About The Position

As a Performance Architect, you will lead the ONTAP performance team across hardware and software projects for ONTAP releases. You will collaborate with architects across engineering development teams to drive the performance agenda, establish performance direction, and guide the team’s technical work. The role offers an opportunity to influence the roadmaps of hardware and software groups and to lead analysis, benchmarking, and optimization for emerging workloads, including Generative and Agentic AI. You will lead ONTAP’s AI benchmark strategy, including industry-standard submissions such as MLPerf Storage. This role is part of Research and Development, focused on technology advances, competitive market and customer workload requirements, product cost and time-to-market, and product quality.

Requirements

• In-depth knowledge of technology trends, architecture differentiation, competitive positioning, and workload optimizations.
• Hands-on experience with AI/ML benchmarks and frameworks, and understanding of how AI training and inference stress storage through throughput, metadata, small random reads, and checkpoint write bursts.
• Familiarity with GPU server architectures and high-performance data paths, including RDMA, NVMe-oF, GPUDirect Storage, and parallel file access.
• Extensive knowledge and experience in computer operating systems, computer architecture and design, data structures, software design, and programming practices.
• Systems programming experience in C and/or C++.
• Strong scripting skills in Perl, Python (primarily within JupyterHub), and Shell.
• Exceptional presentation and influencing skills.
• Ability to make accurate work estimates and develop predictable plans.
• Demonstrated willingness to take on additional tasks and responsibilities that contribute positively to team, department, and company goals.
• Typically, a minimum of 12–15 years of relevant experience.
• A Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, or PhD in Electrical Engineering or Computer Science, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

• Knowledge of storage systems and file systems.
• Experience publishing benchmark results or participating in industry groups such as MLCommons or SPEC.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate and propose architecture options to drive performance.
• Assess ONTAP’s competitiveness and drive performance-focused differentiation, including against competitors’ published AI benchmark results.
• Optimize ONTAP performance for Generative and Agentic AI workloads across data ingest and preparation, training, checkpointing, inference, KV-cache, and RAG/vector search.
• Own ONTAP’s AI benchmark program by planning, running, and publishing industry benchmark submissions such as MLPerf Storage and SPECstorage AI_IMAGE.
• Define AI benchmark methods and workload models that turn real customer AI pipelines into repeatable tests.
• Work with GPU and AI-ecosystem partners on reference architectures, certifications, and high-performance data paths, including GPUDirect Storage, RDMA, NFS over RDMA, and pNFS.
• Work with engineering and product management to drive the performance agenda.
• Evaluate design alternatives and prototype opportunities for performance enhancements.
• Design, implement, execute, analyze, interpret, socialize, and apply storage-oriented performance measurements and results.
• Create tools and automation for running AI benchmarks at GPU-cluster scale.
• Turn benchmark results into technical reports, competitive briefs, and conference talks for product marketing and field teams.

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 stocks (RSUs). Offerings vary by region and are subject to local laws, regulations, and company policies.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal