Staff Software Engineer

Job Summary

NetApp is seeking a passionate and innovative Staff Software Engineer to join our AI Services team. In this role, you will be instrumental in designing and building cutting-edge AI-based experiences that scale across data sets of billions of documents and exabytes of storage. These solutions empower Fortune 500 companies across enterprise on-premises and cloud deployments to leverage the full potential of artificial intelligence and data management. You will collaborate with a talented group of engineers and product managers to deliver scalable, robust, and impactful AI solutions.

Job Requirements

Required Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including designing and shipping large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems in production.
• Strong hands-on expertise across the stack, with experience building modern user experiences using React or Angular and robust backend services using Java, Python, Golang, Node.js, or Rust.
• Proven ability to architect and build APIs, microservices, and event-driven systems with strong understanding of data modeling, SQL/NoSQL databases, caching, and asynchronous processing.
• Experience delivering AI-powered platform capabilities or applications, including working knowledge of LLM-based systems, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic workflows, or intelligent automation patterns.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in driving architecture, design reviews, engineering standards, and execution across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD, automated testing, and production operations, with a strong focus on reliability, performance, scalability, security, and observability.
• Strong understanding of secure software development practices, including authentication, authorization, secrets management, and building services that meet enterprise security and compliance requirements.
• Excellent collaboration, communication, and mentoring skills, with a track record of raising the technical bar and enabling teams to deliver high-quality outcomes.

Preferred Skills And Experience

• Experience building enterprise-scale AI or data platform capabilities, including developer-facing services, reusable frameworks, or shared platform components used across multiple teams.
• Deep experience in designing scalable backend systems, APIs, and microservices with strong engineering judgment around performance, resiliency, maintainability, and operational excellence.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on Azure, AWS, or GCP, including Kubernetes, container orchestration, infrastructure automation, and operating services in production at scale.
• Experience improving engineering productivity through CI/CD pipelines, automated quality gates, release workflows, and test strategies that support rapid and reliable delivery.
• Familiarity with enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance expectations, including identity and access controls, data protection, auditability, and secure-by-default design patterns.
• Preferred experience with Generative AI systems such as LLM application architecture, prompt orchestration, RAG pipelines, vector search, or agentic workflows, along with the ability to guide cross-functional design decisions.

Education

12+ years of industry experience in software development.

7+ years of experience in data management systems and storage platforms for managing and storing data across various workloads and environments.

7+ years of expert-level hands-on experience in fault-tolerant, highly scalable cloud architectures, including service-oriented architectures, cloud-native (FAAS, PAAS), and cloud storage services with at least one hyperscaler (Azure, AWS, GCP).

Work Environment

At NetApp, we embrace a hybrid working environment designed to strengthen connection, collaboration, and culture for all employees. This means that most roles will have some level of in-office and/or in-person expectations, which will be shared.