Principal Systems Software Engineer

NetApp•San Jose, NC

17h

About The Position

NetApp is seeking experienced engineers and technical leaders to architect, design, and build technologies that evolve ONTAP for AI-era data infrastructure. The role addresses complex systems challenges across distributed storage, file systems, data protection, failure resilience, performance, storage efficiency, AI infrastructure, virtualization, and hardware. It is a hands-on technical leadership position requiring deep expertise in one or more systems domains and the ability to solve problems across technical boundaries. The engineer will collaborate with teams across ONTAP, WAFL, RAID, Storage, Platform, Performance, and Hardware to create scalable, resilient, high-performance solutions. Hiring is across multiple teams, and positions may be filled at the MTS5 or MTS6 level based on experience, technical depth, scope, and demonstrated impact.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience designing and developing complex systems software, storage systems, file systems, distributed systems, operating systems, infrastructure software, or related technologies.
Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering complex, production-quality systems.
Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across teams and organizational boundaries.
Deep expertise in at least one area of large-scale storage, distributed systems, or data infrastructure.
Strong hands-on programming experience in C, C++, or comparable systems programming languages.
Strong foundation in operating systems, computer architecture, networking, concurrency, storage, and distributed systems.
Ability to analyze system-level interactions and make technical trade-offs across performance, scalability, reliability, resiliency, efficiency, and cost.
Strong problem-solving and root-cause analysis skills for problems spanning multiple technical domains.
Experience providing technical leadership and mentoring engineers.
Strong written and verbal communication skills.
Bachelor's, master's, or doctoral degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience architecting large-scale distributed or highly available systems.
Kernel-level software development and debugging experience.
Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, GPU data pipelines, or high-performance I/O.
Experience with performance engineering and benchmarking.
Knowledge of NVMe, SSDs, HDDs, or commodity storage platforms.
Experience with hypervisors, virtualization, RDMA, or cloud infrastructure.
Track record of technical innovation through product architecture, patents, publications, or other significant technical contributions.

Responsibilities

Architect and develop next-generation storage and data infrastructure technologies.
Influence technical direction and architectural decisions across multiple engineering teams.
Lead complex systems initiatives from architecture and design through development, optimization, and production delivery.
Translate emerging AI, cloud, and enterprise infrastructure requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Solve complex problems spanning distributed systems, file systems, metadata, data protection, performance, operating systems, networking, and hardware.
Design highly available and fault-tolerant systems with strong consistency, resiliency, recovery, and performance characteristics.
Analyze and optimize system performance across CPU, memory, networking, and storage.
Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through architecture, design, and code reviews.
Lead root-cause analysis of complex cross-subsystem issues.
Develop production-quality systems software using C, C++, or related systems programming languages.