Principal Software Engineer

At NetApp, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud. Here, you'll collaborate with passionate teams, tackle real-world challenges, and see your impact in how customers transform and grow.

About the role

NetApp is uniquely placed in the industry partnering with major hyperscalers (AWS, GCP and Azure) which adds a new challenge for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) driving innovation in the space of Cloud Fundamentals. The Cloud Storage team is embarking on a new charter to address these challenges for cloud-native applications, simplifying customer operations and being a key differentiator. Bring your experience and expertise to build best-in-class SaaS applications with architecture and design deployed across multiple hyperscalers. If you enjoy working on challenging system problems covering different areas of the tech stack, this might be the right opportunity for you.

As a Principal Engineer in NetApp’s Cloud Storage organization, you will lead and execute our most challenging and complex projects. You will work on AWS, Azure, and GCP using cutting-edge technology to provide innovative solutions. You will be responsible for system architecture, decomposing complex problems into simple solutions, understanding system interdependencies and limitations, cloud architectures, performance, scalability, and bringing engineering best practices and testing methods to the team.

Responsibilities

• Provide end-to-end architecture on major initiatives.
• Design distributed systems and cloud-native products, scaling them to production.
• Set technical direction while contributing to implementation, design, and code reviews.
• Make high-quality technical decisions under ambiguity, trading off performance, maintainability, cost, and time-to-market.
• Work effectively across engineering, product, and leadership teams.
• Engage with customers, stakeholders, and the engineering community.

Requirements

• 15+ years in software development.
• 7+ years hands-on experience with fault-tolerant, highly scalable cloud architectures, including service-oriented and cloud-native services (FaaS, PaaS) on at least one hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Strong experience in one or more of Node.js, Python, Java, Go, or Rust. Front-end experience (TypeScript, React, or Angular) is a plus.
• Proactive and self-driven, with strong technical judgment and influential skills.
• Excellent communication skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing data migration systems and storage platforms.
• Experience with filesystems or file/cloud storage protocols (NFS/SMB/iSCSI).
• Built developer-facing products, APIs, or SDKs used by external customers at scale.
• Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Built a new product end-to-end inside a large company.
• Prior experience as a principal engineer or technical lead in a high-performance engineering organization.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a technical area of study (e.g., engineering disciplines).
• Master's degree in a technical field such as engineering or software development preferred.

Pay

The target salary range for this position is $220,000–372,000. The salary offered will be determined by the candidate's location, qualifications, experience, and education and may be outside of this range. Final compensation packages are competitive and in line with industry standards.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health insurance.
• Life insurance.
• Retirement or pension plans.
• Paid Time Off (PTO) and various leave options.
• Performance-based incentives.
• Employee stock purchase plan and/or restricted stocks (RSUs).

Benefits may vary by country and region and are governed by local laws, regulations, and company policies.

Schedule

NetApp embraces a hybrid working environment designed to strengthen connection, collaboration, and culture for all employees. Most roles will have some level of in-office and/or in-person expectations, which will be shared during the recruitment process.

Why You'll Thrive at NetApp

At NetApp, you won't wait for the perfect moment—you'll make it. We celebrate mold breakers, bold thinkers, and problem solvers. We reward initiative, impact, and ownership. We provide flexibility so you can balance professional ambition with your personal life. Here, differences are not just welcomed—they drive everything we do.

NetApp is the trusted partner for organizations transforming data into opportunity. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, we empower customers to run everything from traditional workloads to enterprise AI with unmatched performance, resilience, and security.