Distinguished Engineer

Job Summary

We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer who will work on building and scaling architecture and experience across multiple cloud environments, leveraging open‑source technologies and delivering platform‑as‑a‑service solutions that power mission‑critical workloads. The role focuses on solving the most complex engineering challenges in areas such as service fundamentals—availability, reliability, performance, and scalability—while improving developer velocity through modern CI/CD practices, canary deployments, and real‑user telemetry‑based testing.

A key responsibility will be designing fault‑tolerant, highly available, and low‑latency control‑plane architectures for cloud‑native services. Distinguished Engineers are hands‑on practitioners; at least forty percent of the time will be devoted to producing tangible artifacts such as vision statements, design documents, and source code.

• Lead definition, design, architecture quality, implementation, and delivery of the most advanced, difficult, cross‑cutting challenges across the Cloud business unit.
• Operate with independence and act as force multipliers, delivering on complex challenges.
• Foster a culture of learning and experimentation, advocating best engineering, QA, and operational practices for the entire business unit.
• Serve as a technical leader on demanding, cross‑functional projects, decomposing complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions.
• Understand technical, product, and business nuances, balancing conflicting stakeholder objectives while building trust and demonstrating empathy with customers.
• Architect and build modern CD/CI infrastructure that supports hundreds of developers working across interconnected software deployment pipelines.
• Design modern, cloud‑native QA frameworks and components.
• Mentor other senior and principal engineers on advanced technical issues and contribute to their career development.
• Contribute to building intellectual property through patents.

• Minimum 10+ years of experience as a software engineer.
• 4+ years as a senior Principal Engineer leading multiple engineering teams.
• Expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
• Expertise in designing and building large‑scale systems in a multi‑tiered, distributed environment (SOA).
• Extensive experience building fault‑tolerant, high‑scale distributed architecture on a major cloud provider.
• Experience with cloud‑native application or services operations, data management, migration, and security.
• Excellent communication and writing skills to engage with customers, stakeholders, and the engineering community.
• Proactive, self‑driven, and able to work independently and take ownership of initiatives.
• Experience operating and troubleshooting reliable, scalable software systems.
• Experience building fully automated testing frameworks from code check‑in to deployment.
• Proficiency in at least one modern programming language such as Rust, Go, or Java.
• Prior experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud in cloud‑native architectures.
• Experience with monitoring frameworks such as Cloud Watch, Datadog, Grafana, or Elastic.
• Decent understanding of storage architectures, design patterns, and best practices; preferred experience with RAID, volumes, replication solutions.
• Mentor and coach other senior and principal engineers on advanced technical issues.
• Contribute to building intellectual property through patents.

Bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field, or equivalent experience.

The target salary range for this position is $290,000‑$350,000, adjusted for location, qualifications, experience, and education. Final compensation includes a comprehensive benefits package such as health insurance, life insurance, retirement or pension plans, paid time off, leave options, performance‑based incentives, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stock units, subject to regional variations and local regulations.

Net App is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state, and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination based on age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability, or genetic information, pregnancy, protected veteran status, and any other protected classification.