Forward Deployed Engineer – Principal

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Colorado, +4 more states.

📋 Description

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

• Collaborate with significant enterprise clients during platform modernizations, bare-metal replatforming, stateful workload migrations, and AI inferencing deployments.

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

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

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

• Direct comprehensive migration strategies from legacy bare-metal systems and AI workloads to cloud-native Kubernetes environments.

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

• Convert customer challenges and field trends into product specifications and roadmap priorities.

• Establish technical guidelines for containerizing, tuning, and orchestrating distributed systems, data platforms, and AI engines.

• Define integration strategies across competing enterprise distributions.

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

• Guide and mentor Senior and Staff FDEs.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 10 years of software engineering experience, including over 5 years leading high-stakes infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or large-scale Kubernetes architectures.

• Demonstrated ability to earn technical credibility with C-suite stakeholders while maintaining a hands-on approach in production code.

• Expert-level understanding of Kubernetes internals, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and GitOps architecture (ArgoCD, Flux).

• Extensive experience in designing high-throughput AI inferencing pipelines, virtualized GPU environments (NVIDIA vGPU, MIG, GPUDirect RDMA), model serving frameworks (vLLM, TGI, Triton), and distributed inference architectures.

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

• Significant experience in migrating complex enterprise monoliths, mainframe/bare metal setups, and isolated AI hardware deployments to seamless cloud-native pathways.

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

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

• A Bachelor's degree is preferred; equivalent years of experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.

• 17+ years of relevant experience is required.

🏝️ Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus.

• Competitive equity grant for new hires.

• Annual equity awards.

• Comprehensive medical plans.

• Dental plans.

• Vision plans.

• Participation in the 401(K) plan with company matching.

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).

• Access to Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Company-paid holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

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