The posting
Job Summary
VP of Engineering, Reliability & Quality
The Opportunity
Quality and speed are colliding — NetApp ships across ONTAP and adjacent products at a pace where quality-as-a-downstream-checkpoint no longer holds, and customers increasingly hold us to the same reliability bar as hyperscalers. As VP of Engineering for Reliability & Quality, you’ll own Escalations, Release Engineering, and System Test, with a mandate that reaches further: defining and driving the quality motion — the standards, gates, and metrics — that shape how every engineering team, not just yours, builds and ships.
This is a build-and-lead role for someone who wants to own outcomes they don’t fully control: direct authority over release gates and escalation resolution, paired with the credibility and influence to raise the quality bar across teams that report elsewhere.
Job Requirements
Role:
Reports to: SVP of Platform Engineering
Location: This role will be based in San Jose, CA. While San Jose is strongly preferred, we are open to considering remote candidates for the right individual. Given that our senior leadership team is based in San Jose, we expect this leader to spend meaningful time there.
Scope: Leads Escalations, Release Engineering, and System Test directly — an organization of roughly 300 engineers. The org-wide quality-motion mandate extends by influence across engineering teams outside this reporting line.
What You’ll Own
The executive escalation process end to end — triage, drive resolution of, and communicate status on the highest-severity customer-impacting issues, partnering with the engineering teams that own the underlying code and with Support and field organizations.
Release engineering — build, packaging, qualification, and release gating — using release gates as the primary enforcement mechanism for quality standards across engineering.
System test — integration testing, performance and scale testing, longevity testing, and customer-specific testing — validating the product as a whole, above and beyond the unit and functional testing that dev teams own directly.
The definition and evolution of NetApp’s org-wide quality motion: the standards, metrics (e.g., escape rate, defect density, time-to-resolution, release health), and processes that hold engineering leadership accountable to them.
Root-cause analysis and systemic prevention programs, so recurring failure patterns surfaced through escalations and releases feed back into engineering practice rather than one-off fixes.
CI/CD quality gates and the central test infrastructure and tooling that System Test uses to validate releases across engineering organizations.
Building, developing, and retaining a high-performing, multi-layered engineering leadership team across Escalations, Release Engineering, and System Test — with real focus on sustainable team health, not just delivery velocity.
Close partnership with Support, Product Management, and peer engineering leaders to keep quality standards coherent across the full customer-facing lifecycle, from pre-release qualification through post-release escalation.
A voice in executive technical strategy and release planning, providing the quality and risk perspective on major releases and roadmap decisions.
What we are looking For
Required
15+ years of engineering leadership in infrastructure or systems software, including 8+ years leading multiple layers of engineering management.
A track record owning quality, reliability, escalations, or release engineering at scale for a complex, multi-product platform.
Experience leading large-scale, executive-visibility customer escalations to resolution, including cross-org coordination with Support and field teams.
A track record of driving adoption of standards or metrics across engineering teams outside your reporting line — leading through influence, not just authority.
Excellent executive communication — you can represent quality and risk tradeoffs clearly to senior leadership during release decisions.
Strongly Preferred
Deep familiarity with release engineering practice — build/release pipelines, qualification gates, CI/CD — for complex systems software.
Experience building or scaling system test organizations — integration, performance/scale, longevity, or customer-specific testing.
Experience restructuring or right-sizing engineering teams based on evidence rather than assumption.
A leadership style grounded in developing others, not positional authority.
Education
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
Compensation: The target salary range for this position is 323,000 - 418,000 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.
At NetApp, we embrace a hybrid working environment designed to strengthen connection, collaboration, and culture for all employees. This means that most roles will have some level of in-office and/or in-person expectations, which will be shared during the recruitment process.
Equal Opportunity Employer:
NetApp is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination based on age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability or genetic information, pregnancy, protected veteran status, and any other protected classification.
Why You'll Thrive at NetApp
At NetApp, you won't wait for the perfect moment—you'll make it. The early planning, the extra thought, the bold idea that turns good into great: That's how our people operate and how we continue to push the boundaries of data infrastructure.
NetApp is the trusted partner for organizations transforming data into opportunity. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, we empower customers to run everything from traditional workloads to enterprise AI with unmatched performance, resilience, and security.
Our culture
We celebrate mold breakers, bold thinkers, and problem solvers. We reward initiative, impact, and ownership. We provide flexibility so you can balance professional ambition with your personal life. Here, differences are not just welcomed—they drive everything we do.
If you're ready to innovate, rise to the challenge, and own every moment - make your next move your best one. Apply now.
Submitting an Application
To ensure a streamlined and fair hiring process for all candidates, our team only reviews applications submitted through our company website. This practice allows us to track, assess, and respond to applicants efficiently. Emailing our employees, recruiters, or Human Resources personnel directly will not influence your application.
AI Disclosure
For select roles, some stages of our hiring process may use artificial intelligence tools to help evaluate applications and candidate selection. These tools support—rather than replace—human decision-making.
