Forward Deployed Engineer – Principal

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Colorado, +5 more states.

📋 Description

• Act as a premier technical authority, enterprise strategist, and leader bridging the gap between field operations and engineering within the Infrastructure Software Division.

• Collaborate closely with intricate enterprise accounts during platform modernization efforts, bare-metal re-platforming, stateful workload migrations, and AI inferencing implementations.

• Connect core engineering, product management, executive leadership, and C-suite architects from enterprise customers.

• Design, scale, and validate production-grade VKS and VCF architectures for mission-critical and highly regulated environments.

• Create and implement production systems for real-time LLM inferencing, RAG pipelines, and distributed AI runtime frameworks across GPU clusters.

• Spearhead comprehensive migration strategies transitioning from legacy bare-metal systems and fragmented AI workloads to cloud-native Kubernetes solutions.

• Develop prototype integrations, author production operators/CRDs, and contribute upstream to core ISG codebases.

• Convert customer challenges and field observations into product requirements and roadmap priorities.

• Establish technical patterns for containerization, optimization, and orchestration of distributed systems, databases, streaming platforms, and AI data/compute engines.

• Formulate cross-platform integration strategies across various Kubernetes distributions.

• Set deployment standards, GitOps frameworks, and CAPI/Operator patterns throughout the FDE organization.

• Provide mentorship to Senior and Staff FDEs.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of software engineering experience, including at least 5 years leading critical infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or Kubernetes architectures at scale.

• Demonstrated ability to gain technical credibility with C-suite stakeholders while remaining actively engaged in production code.

• Authority-level expertise in Kubernetes internal operations, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and GitOps architecture (ArgoCD, Flux).

• Extensive experience in architecting high-throughput AI inferencing pipelines, virtualized GPU environments, model serving frameworks, and distributed inference topologies.

• Proven success in architecting and managing high-throughput, low-latency stateful workloads on Kubernetes.

• In-depth experience migrating complex enterprise monoliths, mainframe/bare metal environments, and isolated AI hardware deployments to cloud-native settings.

• Practical experience in developing with Go, Python, or Java for systems-level infrastructure, Kubernetes controllers, custom AI wrappers, or automation frameworks.

• Comprehensive technical proficiency across OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, Rancher RKE/RKS, CSI/CNI, RDMA, InfiniBand, RoCEv2, and storage abstractions.

• Bachelor's degree preferred; relevant experience may substitute for a degree.

• Minimum of 17 years related experience required.

🏝️ Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus.

• Competitive new hire equity grant.

• Annual equity awards.

• Medical, dental, and vision plans.

• 401(K) participation with company matching.

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Company-paid holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

• Paid Family Leave and additional leaves of absence in accordance with applicable laws.