Director, Software Engineer

Job Summary

As the Director of Software Development for NetApp AI Business Unit, you will lead and scale a high-performing engineering organization to deliver innovative, large-scale services for both cloud and On Premises that delight customers and accelerate business growth. In this key leadership role, you will help set technical direction, build and mentor strong teams, and drive execution across complex, multi-team initiatives.

You will demonstrate ownership and insist on high standards of quality, maintainability, performance, availability, and customer experience. You will simplify complexity, work backward from customer needs, and deliver measurable results. This role requires strong collaboration with senior leaders across AI and other business units. Prior experience in storage systems is preferred but not mandatory.

Key Responsibilities

As a Director, Software Development, you will:

• Help define strategic direction for software development and architecture across multiple teams and product lines.
• Lead and scale engineering teams, ensuring alignment with business objectives and technical excellence.
• Drive end-to-end software development lifecycle in an Agile environment, from feature definition to production support.
• Establish and optimize development processes, operational metrics, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Mentor and develop engineering managers and senior engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and inclusion.
• Collaborate with senior leadership and cross-functional teams to define priorities and deliver customer-centric solutions.
• Champion operational excellence, including reliability, scalability, and performance of cloud-native services.
• Recruit and retain top talent, building diverse, high-performing teams.
• Advocate for best practices in engineering and operations across the organization.

Key Qualifications

• 15+ years of industry experience in software development, including large-scale distributed systems.
• 7+ years of leadership experience, managing engineering teams and technical leaders.
• Track record of delivering scalable, available, and low-latency cloud services.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native architectures on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
• Well versed in using agentic engineering using local and/or frontier models.
• Hands-on experience using Distributed Storage Systems.
• Strong business acumen and ability to influence strategy & direction with senior leadership.
• Strong communication skills, capable of presenting complex technical concepts to diverse audiences.
• Experience defining and implementing best practices for the full software development lifecycle.
• Solid understanding of performance, scalability, and enterprise system architecture.
• Experience with data processing, analytics, and AI/ML systems.
• Prior experience building CI/CD infrastructure for large-scale deployments.

Preferred qualifications

• Domain expertise on knowledge graphs, semantics and data modeling.
• Hands-on experience with Distributed Database Systems.
• Hands-on experience with training and deploying AI models.