Principal Release Engineer

Own Every Moment at NetApp
At NetApp, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure—delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud.
Ready to innovate and contribute to our path to $10B? Here, you'll collaborate with passionate teams, tackle real-world challenges, and see your impact in how customers transform and grow. If you're ready to bring curiosity, creativity, and drive to every moment, NetApp is where your journey begins. Join teams that innovate to elevate, drive results, and excel together across every function.
Job Summary
As a Principal Software Release Engineer, you will define, own, and continuously improve the end-to-end release lifecycle for software delivered across cloud-service and storage-platform environments. You will coordinate release planning, build generation, readiness validation, change approvals, deployment execution, status reporting, and post-release follow-through while progressively replacing manual handoffs with reliable automation and clear engineering controls.
Job Requirements
Own the end-to-end software release lifecycle, from release intake and planning through build, validation, approval, deployment, verification, and closure.
Plan and coordinate concurrent releases across development, test, staging, and production environments, maintaining clear schedules, dependencies, milestones, owners, and decision points.
Design, maintain, and improve CI/CD and release automation that reduces manual steps, accelerates delivery, and provides repeatable, auditable outcomes.
Partner with development and quality teams to confirm required test coverage, regression results, performance validation, and environment readiness; escalate gaps that could compromise release quality.
Lead response to build or deployment failures by rapidly coordinating triage, clarifying ownership, documenting the failure path, and ensuring the correct new release, hotfix, retry, rollback, or recovery workflow is initiated.
Conduct post-release reviews and convert lessons learned into improved tooling, templates, quality gates, automation, and release policy.
Mentor engineers and release participants on release processes, tools, quality expectations, change controls, and failure-recovery practices.
Job Requirements
12+ years of software engineering, DevOps, build and release engineering, site reliability engineering, or production engineering experience, including technical leadership for complex, business-critical software releases.
Demonstrated experience managing the full release lifecycle for production software or cloud services across multiple environments and teams.
Hands-on experience with CI/CD systems, build automation, source control, branching and versioning strategies, artifact management, and deployment pipelines.
Proficiency in one or more scripting or programming languages such as Python, PowerShell, Bash, Go, or similar languages used for release automation.
Experience with Azure DevOps, Git, Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or comparable build, release, and work-tracking platforms.
Ability to analyze release risks using defect data, test evidence, dependencies, configuration changes, and operational impact rather than relying only on schedule readiness.
Strong troubleshooting skills with the ability to isolate build, pipeline, configuration, environment, and deployment issues under time pressure.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including concise executive status, detailed technical handoffs, and decision-focused escalation.
High attention to detail, disciplined follow-through, and the ability to manage multiple releases and priorities without losing traceability or control.
Education
IC - Typically requires a minimum of 15 years of related experience.Mgr & Exec - Typically requires a minimum of 10 years of related experience.
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.

Work arrangement
Hybrid