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.
Are you an Apache Cassandra committer who wants to operate at the highest level of technical and community influence?
This role connects deep upstream work - binding committer authority, CEP-level design, release stewardship - directly to production-scale outcomes in one of the largest enterprise Cassandra deployments in the world.
NetApp Instaclustr runs one of the industry's largest Cassandra managed services, spanning a broad range of enterprise customers across financial services, retail, and technology sectors. Our Cassandra engineering team leads active work on Cassandra 6.0, owns releases across core and ecosystem subprojects, and drives upstream contributions that directly address production-scale operator needs.
The successful applicant will become our second Apache Cassandra core committer, joining a team that already includes an established core committer as well as a committer on the Cassandra Drivers project.
You will work at both levels - upstream influence and customer impact - with meaningful autonomy, strong peer collaboration, and direct access to the product and field relationships that turn technical work into commercial outcomes. This is a globally distributed team with up to 10% travel
As a Senior Open Source Software Engineer, your responsibilities will include:
- Lead end-to-end upstream initiatives in Apache Cassandra, from CEP authoring and design consensus through implementation, review, and release, in domains such as storage/compaction, indexing and SAI/vector, distributed repair,
observability, and Cassandra releases.
- Provide binding committer reviews on upstream patches and community contributions, applying the technical rigor and authority that moves high-quality work through the Apache Cassandra review process.
- Co-own Apache Cassandra core release management as part of the rotating committer pool and, where capacity allows, contribute to NetApp-led ecosystem releases (Cassandra Sidecar, Analytics, GoCQL).
- Translate enterprise customer needs into credible upstream proposals, CEP-level designs, and sustained technical engagement that only a committer can supply; advise product and field teams on complex upstream trade-offs.
- Shape community direction through evidence-based participation on the dev@ mailing list, Apache Jira, GitHub, and community forums; influence project
decisions on architecture, release policy, contribution standards, and long-term
roadmap.
- Mentor engineers toward committer standing and raise overall contribution quality through rigorous review practices, test discipline, and clear engineering guidance.
- Improve upstream infrastructure - CI reliability, test coverage, contributor tooling, and release automation - to reduce project-wide maintenance burden and strengthen NetApp's reputation as a steward of the project.
- A minimum of 12 years of applicable professional software engineering experience is required.
- Current Apache Cassandra committer status with a sustained and publicly verifiable upstream track record across patches, reviews, and community standing
in Cassandra core or a closely related subproject.
- Expert Java engineering capability in performance-sensitive, concurrent, and production-grade distributed systems - comfortable writing, reviewing, and
reasoning about complex Cassandra internals at depth.
- Deep mastery of Apache Cassandra internals in at least one major domain: storage
engine and compaction, indexing and SAI/vector, distributed consensus and repair
(including Accord and CEP-37), observability and virtual tables, or release
management and CI.
- Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical work through the Apache open source governance model: CEP authoring or co-sponsorship, design consensus,
mailing-list engagement, and Jira-driven delivery from proposal through merge.
- Strong written communication for asynchronous, global, public technical collaboration - mailing lists, design documents, code reviews, and Jira threads.
- Proven senior-level technical judgment: resolves most blockers independently, determines approach on novel or ambiguous assignments, surfaces systemic risks
proactively, and produces work that is consistent with project and team objectives.
Preferred qualifications
- PMC membership in Apache Cassandra or a related Apache subproject.
- Track record of work in Cassandra 6.0 feature areas (Accord, Transactional Cluster Metadata, CEP-37 automated repair, CEP-38 CQL Management API, ZSTD
dictionary compression, SAI/vector write performance).
- History of mentoring contributors toward reviewer or committer standing in an open
governance project.
- Familiarity with Cassandra ecosystem subprojects: Sidecar, Analytics (Spark bulk),
GoCQL, or Apache Cassandra drivers.
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.
