Principal Systems Software Engineer

NetApp, Inc.•Durham, NC

7h•$227,800 - $338,800

About The Position

NetApp is building the next generation of intelligent data infrastructure to help organizations manage, protect, move, and unlock the value of data across on-premises, hybrid-cloud, and AI environments. The company is hiring senior, principal, and distinguished engineers and technical leaders to architect, design, and build technologies that evolve ONTAP for the AI era. This hands-on technical leadership role focuses on complex systems challenges across areas such as distributed storage, file systems, data protection, failure resilience, performance, storage efficiency, AI data infrastructure, virtualization, and hardware. The engineer will work with teams across ONTAP, WAFL, RAID, Storage, Platform, Performance, and Hardware to develop scalable, resilient, high-performance solutions. Roles may be hired at the MTS5 or MTS6 level based on experience, technical depth, scope, and demonstrated impact. The target salary range is USD 227,800–338,800. The offered salary may vary based on location, qualifications, experience, and education, and may fall outside the stated range. A comprehensive benefits package is offered, with benefits and offerings subject to regional variations and local laws, regulations, and company policies.

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.