Software Engineer AI BU

Job Summary

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.

Key Responsibilities

As a Senior Engineer, you will:

• 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.