Distinguished Engineer - AI (SAN JOSE)

Own Every Moment at NetApp

At NetApp, 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, NetApp is where your journey begins. Join teams that innovate to elevate, drive results, and excel together across every function.

Job Summary

Distinguished Engineer - AI Infrastructure

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.

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.

Core Expertise Required:

• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Cloud-Native Orchestration: Expert in Kubernetes scheduling extensions (device plugins, custom controllers), service mesh for AI microservices, and API gateway patterns for model serving.

Job Requirements

About the team

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.

What will you do:

• Provide the technology strategy to accelerate the pace of innovation within NetApp and the Industry.
• 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.
• Partner with Product management and engineering to define and deliver next generation products for NetApp.
• Influence executive management and engineering to contribute towards a competitive portfolio. Demonstrate influence and act as a force multiplier across engineers at NetApp.
• Mentor senior and principal engineers and be the technical bar-raiser for senior and principal technical roles.
• Evangelize both internally and externally for NetApp products you own and become an industry recognized authority on related technologies and domain.

What will you bring:

• 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.
• Experience building highly resilient and scalable enterprise grade products.
• Experience in building large scale, compute intensive stateful applications.
• Ownership for Product and System architecture for multiple significant projects
• Expertise in coding, design, architecture, subsystems, and technology trends
• Excellent communication skills to communicate with executives, senior leadership on products, technology trends and customer issues.

Compensation:
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. 

At NetApp, we embrace a hybrid working environment designed to strengthen connection, collaboration, and culture for all employees. This means that most roles will have some level of in-office and/or in-person expectations, which will be shared during the recruitment process.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

NetApp 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 s