Software Engineer

About the role

NetApp's Cloud AI team is building an enterprise AI agent platform that helps Fortune 500 companies automate complex workflows on their own data, across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. It brings together large language models, agentic frameworks, and production cloud engineering. We are hiring a Principal Engineer to be the technical anchor for this product. You will own the architecture, set the engineering direction, and build alongside the team. This is a hands‑on role: you will design the core systems and write the production code behind them, while working with leadership to turn product vision into engineering plans the team can ship.

Responsibilities

• Define the product architecture: service boundaries, data models, API contracts, runtime design, and the integration patterns that connect AI models to enterprise systems.
• Design and build the core systems: agent orchestration, knowledge bases and retrieval over enterprise data, tool‑calling, multi‑cloud execution, and the layers that tie them together.
• Own the developer‑facing surface: the APIs, SDKs, and tooling that customers build on. It has to be fast, reliable, and clear to work with.
• Lead technical execution across the team: set engineering standards, run design reviews, unblock engineers, and hold the quality bar while the team ships on schedule.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar of the team.

Requirements

Experience

• 12+ years in software development.
• 7+ years hands‑on 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).

Required Qualifications

• Strong server‑side engineering in one or more of Node.js, Python, Java, Go, or Rust.
• Front‑end experience (TypeScript, React or Angular) is a plus.
• Built RESTful APIs and microservices in production, backed by SQL and/or NoSQL data stores.
• Designed distributed systems, cloud‑native products, or developer infrastructure and scaled them to production.
• Built and maintained CI/CD for large, interconnected deployment pipelines.
• Applied cloud security fundamentals: authentication and authorization (OAuth, SSO), encryption, and compliance.
• Made high‑quality technical decisions under ambiguity, trading off performance, maintainability, cost, and time‑to‑market, and choosing a path the team can execute.
• Communicate clearly with executives and engineers, in person and in writing. You can align a team around a design and write technical documents that settle decisions.
• Work effectively across engineering, product, and leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Designed or built AI agent systems or LLM‑powered products that