Director, Software Engineer

Job Summary

The Director of Software Engineering leads NetApp’s Production Engineering organization, responsible for the reliability, security, and cost efficiency of NetApp’s ONTAP-based cloud products.

This role partners with Product Management, Cloud Architecture, and external hyperscaler teams (Google, AWS, Microsoft) to shift the organization from traditional operations to Production Engineering - replacing manual toil with automation.

The Director owns incident management, CI/CD, security compliance, and team growth, while scaling the exponential customer growth. As it matures, this role moves into direct architecture and engineering - building the Observability, CI/CD, Security, Data Plane, and Control Plane platforms the org runs on, including next-generation, AI-assisted automation that self-heals and self-tunes instead of paging a human.

Responsibilities

Strategic Leadership

• Define and execute the Production Engineering strategy - reliability, automation, observability, and cost efficiency - aligned to cloud platform objectives.
• Set SLA/SLO and error-budget policy; own the roadmap for shifting operational toil into software.
• Anticipate scale, security, and reliability risks across a growing multi-region cloud footprint and drive mitigation.

Engineering Execution

• Own incident management, on-call operations, escalation management, and operational readiness reviews (ORR) across the org.
• Drive CI/CD ownership - release automation, build automation, deployment governance - to reduce release risk and increase deployment velocity.
• Establish reliability, alert-quality, and cost metrics (error budgets, MTTR, paging volume/actionability) and hold operational reviews against them.
• Own quality engineering: regression, integration, and longevity testing; release qualification and test infrastructure.Build AI-assisted software systems as needed to aid above.

People Leadership

• Lead and develop engineering managers and Production Engineers across globally distributed teams (US and India).
• Build and staff on-call rotations with clear primary/secondary ownership by domain; close on-call coverage gaps.
• Drive org design, succession planning, and retention for a technical, high-toil-exposure organization.

Technical Leadership

• Architect and build the org’s Observability, CI/CD, Security, Data Plane, and Control Plane platforms - a working technical role, not an advisory one.
• Own the Secure Development Lifecycle: security reviews, audit readiness, vulnerability remediation, compliance, with direct involvement in the tooling.
• Lead platform engineering - shared infrastructure, regional expansion, automation - including design and implementation.
• Push the org toward AI-assisted, self-healing operations: systems that fix and tune themselves instead of generating pages.

Cross-Functional Partnership

• Partner with external hyperscaler engineering teams (Top 4 Cloud Platforms) on joint incident response and platform issues.
• Represent production health and reliability posture to customers and executive leadership in recurring business reviews.
• Align with Product Management on the operational cost of new features before they ship.

Job Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years of people leadership experience managing managers and/or multiple engineering teams.
• Experience leading large-scale software development initiatives from concept through delivery.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture, cloud technologies, distributed systems, DevOps, and Agile methodologies.
• Experience driving organizational change and scaling engineering organizations.
• Proven ability to influence across technical and non-technical stakeholder groups.
• Experience owning production incident management, on-call operations, and SLA/SLO governance at scale.
• Strong hands-on engineering background - able to architect, design, and write code, not just manage people who do.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building and leading geographically distributed engineering teams.
• Strong financial and operational management experience, including resource planning and budget accountability.
• Has personally built observability, CI/CD, security, or data-plane/control-plane systems at scale.
• Experience with enterprise storage systems (block, file, or object) and the operational and architectural challenges specific to storage infrastructure.
• Kernel-space software engineering experience - device drivers, filesystems, or OS-level storage stacks - beyond application-layer development.

Education

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, or related technical field.

Compensation:

The target salary range for this position is 227,800 - 338,800 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.