Senior Engineer, AI BU

About the role

As a Senior Engineer in NetApp's AI BU, you are a strong, trusted technical contributor — designing and building complex systems within your team while beginning to extend your influence beyond it. You bring deep hands-on expertise to the hardest problems your team faces, are trusted to lead the design and delivery of significant components or projects, and mentor engineers around you. You retain a hands-on, individual-contributor focus.

Responsibilities

• Serve as tech lead and/or primary design owner for a project or component within AI BU, driving it from design through delivery.
• Design and build complex, high-quality software systems, owning technical correctness, performance, and maintainability within your area.
• Author design docs/RFCs for your project or team and participate in design reviews for adjacent teams.
• Write production code and review the most complex designs and PRs within your team.
• Partner with your manager/tech lead and product stakeholders to translate requirements into technical designs.
• Mentor and support the growth of less experienced engineers on your team.
• Identify and help resolve technical risk within your area of ownership — technical debt, scalability limits, reliability gaps.
• Contribute to and help enforce best practices in system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence within your team.
• Stay current on new technologies, frameworks, and patterns, and propose adoption where it adds value.

Key Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including some exposure to large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience as technical lead or primary design owner on a project or team-level initiative.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Working knowledge of using agentic engineering using local and/or frontier models.
• Exposure to Distributed Storage Systems.
• Ability to build consensus and communicate technical trade-offs within your team and to adjacent teams.
• Solid system design skills, with experience owning the architecture of a component or service.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills — able to author design docs and clearly present technical trade-offs.
• Experience with data processing, analytics, or AI/ML systems.
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to a team's technical quality bar.
• Familiarity with CI/CD infrastructure for production deployments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Distributed Database Systems.
• Experience with training and deploying AI models.
• Experience with GPU workloads and accelerated computing infrastructure.

Pay

The target salary range for this position is 170,000 – 253,000 USD. 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, reflecting a variety of factors, and include a comprehensive benefits package.