Distinguished Engineer

Job Summary

We are looking for a Distinguished Engineer who will have the opportunity to 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.

This is a technical leadership role that requires close collaboration with other technical leaders and software engineers to drive innovation, engineering excellence, and the design of scalable architectures. The role will focus on solving the most complex engineering challenges in areas such as service fundamentals—availability, reliability, performance, and scalability—while also 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, not consultants. To earn the respect of the engineering community and keep their skills sharp, it is expected that this role will involve coding and serving as a role model for technical excellence. At least forty percent of the time will be devoted to producing tangible artifacts such as vision statements, design documents, and source code.

Prior experience as a Principal or Senior Principal engineer working on high‑scale, geo‑distributed applications or services built on major cloud providers is highly preferred.

Experience with open-source technologies such as Apache Cassandra, Kafka, Postgre

SQL, or similar distributed systems is strongly valued. Familiarity with storage systems is preferred but not mandatory.

• Lead the definition, design, architecture quality, implementation, and delivery of the most advanced, most difficult, most cross‑cutting, and/or most ambiguous challenges spanning across the Cloud business unit.
• Operate with independence and act as force multipliers to the benefit of the company, delivering on its most complex challenges.
• Foster a culture of learning and experimentation, and advocate for best engineering, QA, and operational practices for the entire business unit.
• Serve as a technical leader on demanding, cross‑functional engineering projects. The expectation will be to functionally decompose complex problems into simple, straightforward solutions and fully understand system interdependencies and limitation.
• Understand not just the technical and product capabilities but the nuances of the Net App cloud business and help to understand and balance conflicting stakeholder objectives, while simultaneously building trust and demonstrating empathy with customers’ needs.
• Architect and build modern CD/CI infrastructure which works all the time for several hundred developers working on multitude of interconnected software deployment pipelines.
• Architect and design modern, cloud native QA framework and components.
• Assist in the career development of others, actively coach and mentor other senior and principal engineers on advanced technical issues.
• Contribute to building intellectual property through patents.

• Minimum of 10+ years of experience as software engineer.
• 4+ years hands‑on experience as a senior Principal Engineer leading multiple software engineering teams.
• Expert knowledge in performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture, and engineering best practices.
• Expert in designing and building large‑scale systems in a multi‑tiered, distributed environment (Service Oriented Architecture).
• Extensive experience building fault tolerant and high scale distributed architecture on one of the major cloud providers.
• Extensive experience of cloud native application or services operations, data management, migration, and security.
• Excellent communication and writing skills, with the ability to effectively engage with customers, stakeholders, and the engineering community.
• Proactive and self‑driven, with the ability to work independently and take ownership of initiatives.
• Experience operating and troubleshooting reliable, scalable software systems.
• Experience building…