About this role
<div><div style="padding:10.0px 0.0px;border:1.0px solid transparent"><div style="font-size:16.0px;word-wrap:break-word"><H2 style="font-size:1.0em;margin:0.0px">Job Summary</H2> </div><div><p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Distinguished Engineer - AI Infrastructure</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">We are seeking a Distinguished Engineer with unrivaled depth in AI/ML inferencing at scale and the distributed systems foundations that power it. You will architect and ship our next-generation AI infrastructure and inferencing platform serving millions of requests with uncompromising latency, throughput, and reliability requirements.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">You set the technical North Star—translating high-stakes business problems into elegant, defensible architectures that teams rally behind. You drive consensus through technical authority, shaping roadmaps where your architectural decisions become company strategy. You invent solutions where standard approaches fail, and turn constraints into lasting competitive moats.</span></p> <p><br><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>Core Expertise Required:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">AI Inferencing & ML Systems: Deep hands-on experience with high-performance inference engines (TensorRT, vLLM, ONNX Runtime, Triton), model optimization (quantization, pruning, distillation), and serving patterns for LLMs and computer vision models at scale. Proven track record building, architecting RAG pipelines and optimizing retrieval-augmented generation workflows for production latency targets.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Distributed Systems at Scale: 15+ years architecting fault-tolerant, low-latency distributed systems. Expert-level understanding of consensus protocols, distributed state management, and data consistency models under partition. Experience with high-performance filesystems and storage engines optimized for AI workloads (checkpoints, model artifacts, training datasets).</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">AI Infrastructure & Platform Engineering: Built enterprise-grade or SaaS platforms specifically designed for AI/ML workloads—model registries, feature stores, inference gateways, and multi-tenant serving infrastructure. Deep familiarity with GPU/TPU cluster orchestration, memory hierarchy optimization, and heterogeneous compute scheduling.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">High-Performance Data Planes: Designed and implemented high-throughput, low-latency networking stacks for critical data path operations. Expertise in RDMA, DPDK, kernel bypass techniques, and custom protocols for inter-service and accelerator-to-accelerator communication.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Security & Multi-Tenancy: Hardened multi-tenant ML infrastructure with robust isolation, end-to-end encryption, key management for model weights, and fine-grained RBAC/ABAC for data scientists and production workloads.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Cloud-Native Orchestration: Expert in Kubernetes scheduling extensions (device plugins, custom controllers), service mesh for AI microservices, and API gateway patterns for model serving.</span></li> </ul></div></div><div style="padding:10.0px 0.0px;border:1.0px solid transparent"><div style="font-size:16.0px;word-wrap:break-word"><H2 style="font-size:1.0em;margin:0.0px">Job Requirements</H2> </div><div><p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>About the team</strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">ONTAP is NetApp’s flagship storage operating system. The ONTAP team drives the product strategy, roadmap, and engineering delivery for ONTAP software and systems. You are responsible for developing innovative solutions and architecture for ONTAP software and systems spanning the areas of filesystems and storage, security, networking and protocols. The solutions you architect and design will drive mission critical applications, AI infrastructure and cloud workflows for Fortune 500 companies.</span></p> <p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>What will you do:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> Provide the technology strategy to accelerate the pace of innovation within NetApp and the Industry.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Define the roadmap and long-term vision, derived from key business priorities, technology and competitive trends as well as new and emerging customer use cases.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> Partner with Product management and engineering to define and deliver next generation products for NetApp.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"> Influence executive management and engineering to contribute towards a competitive portfolio. Demonstrate influence and act as a force multiplier across engineers at NetApp.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Mentor senior and principal engineers and be the technical bar-raiser for senior and principal technical roles.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Evangelize both internally and externally for NetApp products you own and become an industry recognized authority on related technologies and domain.</span></li> </ul> <p><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><strong>What will you bring:</strong></span></p> <ul> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Globally recognized as domain expert in software and system design for highly scalable distributed storage and databases, control and data plane architectures required to fuel large scale infrastructure for serving Gen AI and AI as a Service workloads.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Experience building highly resilient and scalable enterprise grade products.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Experience in building large scale, compute intensive stateful applications.</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Ownership for Product and System architecture for multiple significant projects</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Expertise in coding, design, architecture, subsystems, and technology trends</span></li> <li style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><span style="font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif">Excellent communication skills to communicate with executives, senior leadership on products, technology trends and customer issues.</span></li> </ul></div></div></div><p>Compensation:<br>The target salary range for this position is 266,050 - 396,000 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. This may cover Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Retirement or Pension Plans, Paid Time Off, various Leave options, Performance-Based Incentives, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stocks (RSU’s), with all offerings subject to regional variations and governed by local laws, regulations, and company policies. Benefits may vary by country and region, and further details will be provided as part of the recruitment process. </p>