Senior Manager, Release Engineering & Site Reliability (DevOps , CI/CD)

Job Summary

NetApp is building a dedicated CI/CD organization to qualify and sustain the NetApp stack for a key growing NetApp business partnership in air-gapped, high-assurance environments: ONTAP AFF, ONTAP Select, StorageGRID, and Trident. This Senior Manager will stand up and lead that team, owning the full software qualification and sustaining lifecycle from automation strategy, test design, and verification through troubleshooting, release readiness, patch qualification, operational follow-through, and continuous improvement of managed-service reliability.

This is not a product-feature team and not a lab-operations team. Product engineering owns features. Central Test Lab (CTL) owns physical lab infrastructure, hardware pods, and testbed provisioning. This manager owns how software is qualified, automated, released, patched, and kept current for the partner environment.

The role is M4 in scope: strategy and operating model for a new multi-product qualification function, hiring and developing the team, and delivery against enterprise-agreement release and operational commitments.

Job Requirements

What You Will Do

Team Leadership & Operations

• Build, lead, mentor, and develop a high-performing CI/CD engineering team, establishing priorities, staffing plans, execution cadence, and performance expectations.
• Define operational responsibilities across Central Test Lab (CTL), Product Engineering, Quality Engineering, and Production Support teams.
• Own day-to-day software operations for partner environments, including release qualification, patch validation, software maintenance, and deployment readiness.
• Partner with stakeholders to define acceptance testing strategies, release readiness criteria, and engagement models.
• Lead the end-to-end software qualification lifecycle, including planning, test development, validation, defect management, release evidence, and process improvements.

CI/CD Infrastructure & Automation

• Build and operate pre-production CI/CD environments supporting both simulator-based continuous integration and hardware qualification testing.
• Integrate air-gapped and partner-representative environments into automated qualification workflows.
• Drive release quality through automated regression testing, release gates, reproducible test results, and audit-ready evidence.
• Develop scalable infrastructure automation and scripting practices that enable consistent, repeatable qualification across diverse test environments.

Solution Acceptance Testing (SAT)

• Execute partner-defined acceptance testing across file, block, object, and container storage workloads before software delivery.
• Maintain interoperability and regression coverage across ONTAP, ONTAP Select, Trident, StorageGRID, firmware, and API updates.
• Lead disruptive testing, network validation, and bring-your-own-network qualification, including cluster rebuilds, re-imaging, and hardware-dependent test scenarios.
• Validate automated zero-day deployment and controller bring-up workflows, including REST and DHCP-based provisioning.

Reliability & Release Excellence

• Establish qualification SLAs, release tracking processes, and readiness reporting for software deliveries.
• Drive effective defect triage, ownership, prioritization, and closure across testing and partner environments.
• Support enterprise operational requirements through patch qualification, incident collaboration, root-cause analysis, escalation support, and on-call participation where required.
• Monitor release health, qualification pipeline reliability, system availability, performance, defect trends, and test infrastructure health using observability tools and dashboards to improve predictability and release confidence.

Scope Boundaries

• CTL retains ownership of physical lab infrastructure, site readiness, power, cooling, and hardware pods.
• Product Engineering remains responsible for feature development across ONTAP, ONTAP Select, Trident, and StorageGRID.
• Customer Product Engineering and SupportEdge retain ownership of production incident command and customer-facing operations.

Education

Required qualifications

• Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 12 or more years of experience in software, systems, or infrastructure engineering, including 5 or more years leading engineers.
• Proven experience standing up or scaling a CI/CD, release-qualification, site-reliability, or test-automation organization for a complex product.
• Hands-on fluency with Linux or other Unix-like operating systems, distributed systems, automated test frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and release automation.
• Strong problem-solving capability across complex software, infrastructure, and storage-system failure modes, with the ability to drive issues from reproduction through root-cause inputs and closure criteria.
• Experience with scripting and infrastructure automation using tools or languages such as Python, Go, Ansible, Terraform, Perl, Ruby, or comparable technologies.
• Experience qualifying storage, Kubernetes/CSI, or large-scale infrastructure software across block, file, or object.
• Demonstrated ability to partner across product, lab and test, and customer or hyperscaler engineering organizations.
• Strong understanding of SDLC, DevOps, release-management, and production-quality engineering practices in complex enterprise software environments.
• Track record of hiring, coaching, mentoring, and holding a team to operational commitments, with strong written and verbal communication skills for executive, engineering, and customer-facing audiences.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with ONTAP, Trident, StorageGRID, ONTAP Select, or comparable enterprise storage and CSI stacks.
• Air-gapped, sovereign, or high-assurance environment qualification.
• Network overlay experience such as VXLAN/EVPN and customer-provided networking models.
• Kubernetes, container-based infrastructure, Terraform or Ansible equivalents, and public-cloud, private-cloud, or high-assurance cloud-adjacent APIs; hyperscaler or partner cloud experience is helpful but not required.
• Prior work against contractual service levels, acceptance-test programs, or 24x7 operational support models.
• Familiarity with observability, release-health dashboards, reliability metrics, and engineering mechanisms for improving system availability, performance, and qualification throughput.

Compensation:
The target salary range for this position is 196,350 - 292,600 USD. The salary offered will be determined by the candidate's location, qualifications, experience, and education and may be outside of this range. The range is based on 'On Target Earnings’ (OTE) representing the total potential earnings, which is the sum of the base salary and potential commission earned when performance targets are achieved. 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, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stocks (RSU’s). These offerings are subject to regional variations and governed by local laws, regulations, and company policies. We will provide detailed information about the specific benefits for your region during the recruitment process.