{"id":1310658,"url":"https://alion.io/job/netapp-distinguished-engineer-ai","title":"Distinguished Engineer - AI","company":{"id":58700,"name":"NetApp","domain":"netapp.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/netapp","size_band":"1001-5000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Eightfold","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":92,"open_postings":27,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.111,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":61,"computed_at":"2026-09-30T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Jose, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":266050,"max":396000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":396000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"API Gateway","optional":false},{"name":"Computer Vision","optional":false},{"name":"Feature Store","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Model Distillation","optional":false},{"name":"ONNX Runtime","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Quantization","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Service Mesh","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":false},{"name":"TPU","optional":false},{"name":"Triton","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-02-26T23:30:19Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-04","last_verified_at":"2026-10-01T02:27:58Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":216,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":215},"description":"Job Summary\nDistinguished Engineer - AI Infrastructure\nWe 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.\nYou 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.\nCore Expertise Required:\nAI 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.\nDistributed 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).\nAI 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.\nHigh-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.\nSecurity & 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.\nCloud-Native Orchestration: Expert in Kubernetes scheduling extensions (device plugins, custom controllers), service mesh for AI microservices, and API gateway patterns for model serving.\nJob Requirements\nAbout the team\nONTAP 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.\nWhat will you do:\nProvide the technology strategy to accelerate the pace of innovation within NetApp and the Industry.\nDefine the roadmap and long-term vision, derived from key business priorities, technology and competitive trends as well as new and emerging customer use cases.\nPartner with Product management and engineering to define and deliver next generation products for NetApp.\nInfluence executive management and engineering to contribute towards a competitive portfolio. Demonstrate influence and act as a force multiplier across engineers at NetApp.\nMentor senior and principal engineers and be the technical bar-raiser for senior and principal technical roles.\nEvangelize both internally and externally for NetApp products you own and become an industry recognized authority on related technologies and domain.\nWhat will you bring:\nGlobally 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.\nExperience building highly resilient and scalable enterprise grade products.\nExperience in building large scale, compute intensive stateful applications.\nOwnership for Product and System architecture for multiple significant projects\nExpertise in coding, design, architecture, subsystems, and technology trends\nExcellent communication skills to communicate with executives, senior leadership on products, technology trends and customer issues.\nCompensation:\nThe 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5475,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Life insurance","Retirement plans"],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Cybersecurity","Natural Resources","Digital Storage"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T15:53:18Z"}],"liveness":{"score":13,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.453,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":215,"expected_fill_days":61,"reasons":["conf:23","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-09-30T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":396000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/netapp-distinguished-engineer-ai","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/netapp-distinguished-engineer-ai.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-01T03:00:27Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2425,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2575,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-02T00:00:00Z"}}}