Sr Director, Software Engineer AI BU

NetApp is a leader in intelligent data infrastructure, delivering solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data. As the Senior Director of Software Development for the AI business unit, you will lead a high-performing engineering organization to deliver innovative services that enhance customer experience and accelerate business growth.

Responsibilities:

• Set 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 senior engineering leaders, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and inclusion
• Collaborate with executive 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

Requirements:

• 15 years of industry experience in software development, including large-scale distributed systems
• 10 years of leadership experience, managing multiple engineering teams and senior technical leaders
• Proven track record of delivering highly 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 at the executive level
• Exceptional communication skills, capable of presenting complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
• Experience defining and implementing best practices for the full software development lifecycle
• Expertise in performance, scalability, and enterprise system architecture
• Experience with data processing, analytics, and AI/ML systems
• Domain expertise on knowledge graphs, semantics and data modeling
• Prior experience building CI/CD infrastructure for large-scale deployments
• Hands-on experience with Distributed Database Systems
• Hands-on experience with training and deploying AI models