Principal Software Engineer

At Net App, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud.

Ready to innovate and contribute to our path to $10B? Here, you'll collaborate with passionate teams, tackle real-world challenges, and see your impact in how customers transform and grow. If you're ready to bring curiosity, creativity, and drive to every moment, Net App is where your journey begins. Join teams that innovate to elevate, drive results, and excel together across every function.

Net App's Cloud AI team is building an enterprise AI agent platform that helps Fortune 500 companies automate complex workflows on their own data, across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. It brings together large language models, agentic frameworks, and production cloud engineering.

We are hiring a Principal Engineer to be the technical anchor for this product. You will own the architecture, set the engineering direction, and build alongside the team. This is a hands-on role: you will design the core systems and write the production code behind them, while working with leadership to turn product vision into engineering plans the team can ship.

• Define the product architecture: service boundaries, data models, API contracts, runtime design, and the integration patterns that connect AI models to enterprise systems.
• Design and build the core systems: agent orchestration, knowledge bases and retrieval over enterprise data, tool-calling, multi-cloud execution, and the layers that tie them together.
• Own the developer-facing surface: the APIs, SDKs, and tooling that customers build on. It has to be fast, reliable, and clear to work with.
• Lead technical execution across the team: set engineering standards, run design reviews, unblock engineers, and hold the quality bar while the team ships on schedule.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar of the team.

• 12+ years in software development.
• 7+ years hands-on with fault-tolerant, highly scalable cloud architectures, including service-oriented and cloud-native services (FaaS, PaaS) on at least one hyperscaler (AWS, Azure, or GCP).

• Strong server-side engineering in one or more of Node.js, Python, Java, Go, or Rust. Front-end experience (Type Script, React or Angular) is a plus.
• Built RESTful APIs and microservices in production, backed by SQL and/or No
  
  SQL data stores.
• Designed distributed systems, cloud-native products, or developer infrastructure and scaled them to production.
• Built and maintained CI/CD for large, interconnected deployment pipelines.
• Applied cloud security fundamentals: authentication and authorization (OAuth, SSO), encryption, and compliance.
• Made high-quality technical decisions under ambiguity, trading off performance, maintainability, cost, and time-to-market, and choosing a path the team can execute.
• Communicate clearly with executives and engineers, in person and in writing. You can align a team around a design and write technical documents that settle decisions.
• Work effectively across engineering, product, and leadership.

• Designed or built AI agent systems or LLM-powered products that run model inference in production: tool calling, RAG, prompt orchestration.
• Deep familiarity with agentic design patterns: tool-use protocols, context management, multi-step reasoning, and grounding models in live enterprise data.
• Built developer-facing products, APIs, or SDKs used by external customers at scale.
• Containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code…