Principal Software Engineer

About the role

NetApp is uniquely positioned in the industry, partnering with major hyperscalers (AWS, GCP, and Azure), which adds new challenges for Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and drives innovation in Cloud Fundamentals. The Cloud Storage team is embarking on a new charter to address these challenges for cloud-native applications, simplifying customer operations and serving as a key differentiator. Bring your experience and expertise to the new frontier to build best-in-class SaaS applications with architecture and design deployed across multiple hyperscalers.

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. Your responsibilities will include 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 effectively.

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.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in 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 (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.

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. Our culture celebrates mold breakers, bold thinkers, and problem solvers. We reward initiative, impact, and ownership, providing flexibility to balance professional ambition with personal life. Differences drive everything we do, and we empower customers to run everything from traditional workloads to enterprise AI with unmatched performance, resilience, and security.