Principal Software Engineer

About the role

NetApps Cloud AI team is building an enterprise AI agent platform that helps Fortune 500 companies automate complex workflows on their own data across on-premises and multi-cloud environments. It brings together large language models agentic frameworks and production cloud engineering.
We are hiring a Principal Engineer to be the technical anchor for this product. You will own the architecture set the engineering direction and build alongside the team. This is a hands-on role: you will design the core systems and write the production code behind them while working with leadership to turn product vision into engineering plans the team can ship.

What you will build

• Define the product architecture: service boundaries data models API contracts runtime design and the integration patterns that connect AI models to enterprise systems.
• Design and build the core systems: agent orchestration knowledge bases and retrieval over enterprise data tool-calling multi-cloud execution and the layers that tie them together.
• Own the developer-facing surface: the APIs SDKs and tooling that customers build on. It has to be fast reliable and clear to work with.
• Lead technical execution across the team: set engineering standards run design reviews unblock engineers and hold the quality bar while the team ships on schedule.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar of the team.

Experience Requirements

• 12 years in software development.
• 7 years hands-on with fault-tolerant highly scalable cloud architectures including service-oriented and cloud-native services (FaaS PaaS) on at least one hyperscaler (AWS Azure or GCP).

Required Qualifications

• Strong server-side engineering in one or more of Python Java Go or Rust. Front-end experience (TypeScript React or Angular) is a plus.
• Built RESTful APIs and microservices in production backed by SQL and/or NoSQL data stores.
• Designed distributed systems cloud-native products or developer infrastructure and scaled them to production.
• Built and maintained CI/CD for large interconnected deployment pipelines.
• Applied cloud security fundamentals: authentication and authorization (OAuth SSO) encryption and compliance.
• Made high-quality technical decisions under ambiguity trading off performance maintainability cost and time-to-market and choosing a path the team can execute.
• Communicate clearly with executives and engineers in person and in writing. You can align a team around a design and write technical documents that settle decisions.
• Work effectively across engineering product and leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Designed or built AI agent systems or LLM-powered products that run model inference in production: tool calling RAG prompt orchestration.
• Deep familiarity with agentic design patterns: tool-use protocols context management multi-step reasoning and grounding models in live enterprise data.
• Built developer-facing products APIs or SDKs used by external customers at scale.
• Containerization and orchestration (Docker Kubernetes) and infrastructure as code (Terraform CloudFormation).
• Background in enterprise infrastructure cloud data services or storage systems with a working understanding of how enterprise environments run at scale.
• Built a new product end-to-end inside a larger company.
• Prior experience as a principal engineer or technical lead in a high-performance engineering organization.

Education

• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering or related field; or equivalent practical experience.