{"id":1302513,"url":"https://alion.io/job/netapp-principal-engineer-ai-bu","title":"Principal Engineer, AI BU","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":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","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":196350,"max":292600,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":292600},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-31T19:33:39Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-04","last_verified_at":"2026-09-26T22:31:07Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":57,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":57},"description":"Job Summary\nAs a Principal Engineer in NetApp's AI BU, you are a senior technical authority - architecting and tech-leading complex, cross-team initiatives and setting technical direction for products at the intersection of storage, data, and AI. You are the engineer other teams turn to for the hardest design and architecture problems, and you drive outcomes through technical depth and influence rather than management authority, retaining a hands-on, individual-contributor focus.\nKey Responsibilities\nAs a Principal Engineer, you will:\nServe as technical architect and/or tech lead across one or more major AI BU initiatives, owning system design end-to-end.\nSet technical direction and design standards across multiple engineering teams, ensuring architectural coherence.\nDrive ambiguous, cross-cutting technical problems to well-reasoned solutions, authoring design docs/RFCs that align stakeholders across teams.\nStay hands-on: write production code, review the highest stakes designs and PRs, and personally unblock the hardest engineering problems.\nPartner with engineering and product leadership to translate business priorities into technical roadmaps and architecture decisions.\nMentor and raise the technical bar for engineers across teams, without formal management authority over them.\nIdentify systemic technical risk - architectural debt, scalability bottlenecks, reliability gaps - and drive it to resolution before it becomes a team-level fire.\nRepresent AI BU engineering in cross-functional and executive technical reviews, articulating trade-offs and recommendations.\nChampion best practices in system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence across the teams you influence.\nEvaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, and architectural patterns, balancing innovation with pragmatism.\nKey Qualifications\n12+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including designing and building large-scale distributed systems.\nDemonstrated track record as technical lead or architect on multi-team or org-wide initiatives.\nDeep hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.\nWell versed in using agentic engineering using local and/or frontier models.\nHands-on experience with Distributed Storage Systems.\nProven ability to build technical consensus and influence engineering direction across teams without formal authority.\nStrong system design skills, with direct ownership of architecture for highly available, low-latency, large-scale services.\nExcellent written and verbal communication skills - able to author design docs/RFCs and present technical trade-offs to engineers and executives alike.\nExperience with data processing, analytics, and AI/ML systems.\nTrack record of mentoring engineers and raising the technical quality bar across teams.\nPrior experience building CI/CD infrastructure for large-scale deployments.\nPreferred Qualifications\nDomain expertise on knowledge graphs, semantics and data modeling.\nHands-on experience with Distributed Database Systems.\nHands-on experience with training and deploying AI models.\nHands-on experience with GPU workloads and accelerated computing infrastructure.\nCompensation:\nThe target salary range for this position is 196,350 - 292,600 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":4021,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"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":["Cybersecurity","Natural Resources","Cloud Platforms (IaaS & PaaS)","Digital Storage"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-26T12:11:05Z"}],"liveness":{"score":24,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.664,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":57,"expected_fill_days":33,"reasons":["conf:6","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T04:58:11Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":292600,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/netapp-principal-engineer-ai-bu","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/netapp-principal-engineer-ai-bu.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-27T04:58:11Z","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":4358,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":642,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-28T00:00:00Z"}}}