Sr Director, Software Engineer

About the Role

As the Senior Director of Software Development for NetApp’s AI business unit, you will lead and scale a high-performing engineering organization to deliver innovative, large-scale services for both cloud and on-premises that delight customers and accelerate business growth. In this pivotal leadership role, you will set the technical vision, build and mentor exceptional teams, and drive execution across complex, large-scale initiatives. You will demonstrate ownership and insist on the highest standards of quality, maintainability, performance, availability, and customer experience. This role requires strong collaboration with senior leaders across Cloud Storage and other business units. Prior experience in storage systems is preferred but not mandatory.

Responsibilities

• Set strategic direction for software development and architecture across multiple teams and product lines.
• Lead and scale engineering teams, ensuring alignment with business objectives and technical excellence.
• Drive end-to-end software development lifecycle in an Agile environment, from feature definition to production support.
• Establish and optimize development processes, operational metrics, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Mentor and develop senior engineering leaders, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and inclusion.
• Collaborate with executive leadership and cross-functional teams to define priorities and deliver customer-centric solutions.
• Champion operational excellence, including reliability, scalability, and performance of cloud-native services.
• Recruit and retain top talent, building diverse, high-performing teams.
• Advocate for best practices in engineering and operations across the organization.

Qualifications

• 15 years of industry experience in software development, including large-scale distributed systems.
• 10 years of leadership experience, managing multiple engineering teams and senior technical leaders.
• Proven track record of delivering highly scalable, available, and low-latency cloud services.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Well-versed in using agentic engineering with local and/or frontier models.
• Hands-on experience with distributed storage systems.
• Strong business acumen and ability to influence strategy and direction at the executive level.
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of presenting complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Experience defining and implementing best practices for the full software development lifecycle.
• Expertise in performance, scalability, and enterprise system architecture.
• Experience with data processing, analytics, and AI/ML systems.
• Domain expertise in knowledge graphs, semantics, and data modeling.
• Prior experience building CI/CD infrastructure for large-scale deployments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with distributed database systems.
• Hands-on experience with training and deploying AI models.

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. The early planning, the extra thought, the bold idea that turns good into great: That's how our people operate and how we continue to push the boundaries of data infrastructure. 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.

Culture

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.