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.