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

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