Senior Manager, Release Engineering & Site Reliability (DevOps , CI/CD)

NetApp, Inc.•Durham, NC

7d•$196,350 - $292,600•Remote

About The Position

NetApp is establishing a dedicated CI/CD organization to manage the qualification and sustainment of its software stack for a significant NetApp business partnership operating in air-gapped, high-assurance environments. This includes ONTAP AFF, ONTAP Select, StorageGRID, and Trident. The Senior Manager will be responsible for building and leading this team, overseeing the entire software qualification and sustainment lifecycle. This encompasses automation strategy, test design, verification, troubleshooting, release readiness, patch qualification, operational follow-through, and continuous improvement of managed-service reliability. This role is distinct from product-feature teams and lab-operations teams, focusing specifically on the qualification, automation, release, patching, and currency of software for the partner environment. The position is an M4 scope, involving strategy development, operating model definition for a new multi-product qualification function, team hiring and development, and delivery against enterprise-agreement release and operational commitments.

Requirements

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
12 or more years of experience in software, systems, or infrastructure engineering, including 5 or more years leading engineers.
Proven experience standing up or scaling a CI/CD, release-qualification, site-reliability, or test-automation organization for a complex product.
Hands-on fluency with Linux or other Unix-like operating systems, distributed systems, automated test frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and release automation.
Strong problem-solving capability across complex software, infrastructure, and storage-system failure modes, with the ability to drive issues from reproduction through root-cause inputs and closure criteria.
Experience with scripting and infrastructure automation using tools or languages such as Python, Go, Ansible, Terraform, Perl, Ruby, or comparable technologies.
Experience qualifying storage, Kubernetes/CSI, or large-scale infrastructure software across block, file, or object.
Demonstrated ability to partner across product, lab and test, and customer or hyperscaler engineering organizations.
Strong understanding of SDLC, DevOps, release-management, and production-quality engineering practices in complex enterprise software environments.
Track record of hiring, coaching, mentoring, and holding a team to operational commitments, with strong written and verbal communication skills for executive, engineering, and customer-facing audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ONTAP, Trident, StorageGRID, ONTAP Select, or comparable enterprise storage and CSI stacks.
Air-gapped, sovereign, or high-assurance environment qualification.
Network overlay experience such as VXLAN/EVPN and customer-provided networking models.
Kubernetes, container-based infrastructure, Terraform or Ansible equivalents, and public-cloud, private-cloud, or high-assurance cloud-adjacent APIs; hyperscaler or partner cloud experience is helpful but not required.
Prior work against contractual service levels, acceptance-test programs, or 24x7 operational support models.
Familiarity with observability, release-health dashboards, reliability metrics, and engineering mechanisms for improving system availability, performance, and qualification throughput.

Responsibilities

Build, lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing CI/CD engineering team, establishing priorities, staffing plans, execution cadence, and performance expectations.
Define operational responsibilities across Central Test Lab (CTL), Product Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Production Support teams.
Own day-to-day software operations for partner environments, including release qualification, patch validation, software maintenance, and deployment readiness.
Partner with stakeholders to define acceptance testing strategies, release readiness criteria, and engagement models.
Lead the end-to-end software qualification lifecycle, including planning, test development, validation, defect management, release evidence, and process improvements.
Build and operate pre-production CI/CD environments supporting both simulator-based continuous integration and hardware qualification testing.
Integrate air-gapped and partner-representative environments into automated qualification workflows.
Drive release quality through automated regression testing, release gates, reproducible test results, and audit-ready evidence.
Develop scalable infrastructure automation and scripting practices that enable consistent, repeatable qualification across diverse test environments.
Execute partner-defined acceptance testing across file, block, object, and container storage workloads before software delivery.
Maintain interoperability and regression coverage across ONTAP, ONTAP Select, Trident, StorageGRID, firmware, and API updates.
Lead disruptive testing, network validation, and bring-your-own-network qualification, including cluster rebuilds, re-imaging, and hardware-dependent test scenarios.
Validate automated zero-day deployment and controller bring-up workflows, including REST and DHCP-based provisioning.
Establish qualification SLAs, release tracking processes, and readiness reporting for software deliveries.
Drive effective defect triage, ownership, prioritization, and closure across testing and partner environments.
Support enterprise operational requirements through patch qualification, incident collaboration, root-cause analysis, escalation support, and on-call participation where required.
Monitor release health, qualification pipeline reliability, system availability, performance, defect trends, and test infrastructure health using observability tools and dashboards to improve predictability and release confidence.