Principal Engineer, AI BU

About the role

NetApp is looking for a Principal Engineer in its AI BU. You will be a senior technical authority who architects and leads complex, cross-team initiatives and sets technical direction for products at the intersection of storage, data and AI. You drive outcomes through technical depth and influence while keeping a hands-on, individual-contributor focus.

Key responsibilities

• Serve as technical architect and/or tech lead across major AI BU initiatives, owning system design end to end.
• Set technical direction and design standards across multiple engineering teams.
• Drive ambiguous, cross-cutting problems to well-reasoned solutions, authoring design docs and RFCs.
• Write production code, review high-stakes designs and PRs, and personally unblock hard engineering problems.
• Partner with engineering and product leadership to turn business priorities into technical roadmaps and architecture decisions.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar across teams without formal management authority.
• Identify and resolve architectural debt, scalability bottlenecks and reliability gaps.
• Represent AI BU engineering in cross-functional and executive technical reviews, and champion best practices in system design, testing, observability and operational excellence.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks and architectural patterns.

Required profile

• 12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated track record as technical lead or architect on multi-team or org-wide initiatives.
• Proven ability to build technical consensus and influence engineering direction without formal authority.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field; Master's preferred or equivalent practical experience.

Required skills

• Cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud.
• Agentic engineering using local and/or frontier models.
• Distributed storage systems and data processing, analytics and AI/ML systems.
• CI/CD infrastructure for large-scale deployments.
• Preferred: knowledge graphs, distributed databases, AI model training and deployment, GPU workloads.

What we offer

• Target salary range of 227,800 - 338,800 USD, depending on location, qualifications and experience.
• Benefits such as health insurance, life insurance, retirement plans, paid time off, performance incentives, employee stock purchase plan and/or RSUs.
• Hybrid working environment, with in-office expectations shared during recruitment.

Applications are submitted only through the company website; emailing recruiters or HR directly does not affect the process. Some hiring stages may use AI tools to evaluate applications.