Forward Deployed Engineer – Staff

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New Mexico.

📋 Description

• Serve as an embedded engineering liaison within the Infrastructure Software Division.

• Collaborate with core software architects, product managers, and enterprise client developers to minimize deployment challenges.

• Identify obstacles to migration and usability issues in customer environments.

• Develop and test field fixes to reduce feature iteration cycles.

• Manage customer interactions from pre-migration assessment through to go-live and operational stabilization.

• Write production-level code, create build manifests, troubleshoot live networking, storage, and GPU failures, and enhance VKS performance.

• Incorporate field-tested code, architectural designs, and customer challenges into core engineering requirements.

• Design, deploy, and maintain production-quality VKS clusters across VMware Cloud Foundation and hybrid cloud infrastructure.

• Lead migrations from enterprise platforms, bare metal setups, and legacy data stacks to VKS or cloud-native Kubernetes environments.

• Deploy, optimize, and scale AI inferencing, RAG, vector search, and model-serving workloads on Kubernetes.

• Containerize, refactor, and transition stateful engines, message brokers, distributed caches, and analytics platforms.

• Architect cloud-native deployments for data processing, orchestration, and distributed AI frameworks.

• Provide guidance for clients operating VKS in conjunction with OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, or Rancher distributions.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 12 years of related experience is required.

• A Bachelor's degree is preferred.

• Relevant experience may be considered in lieu of a degree.

• Experience working within or closely with core software/R&D divisions rather than solely in IT or professional services.

• A proven history of managing long-term, complex engineering projects with customer technical leadership and developers.

• Ability to convert technical customer requirements and field workarounds into product specifications and feature requests.

• Practical experience operating GPU-accelerated Kubernetes nodes.

• Familiarity with vLLM, TGI, Triton Inference Server, Milvus, Qdrant, Pgvector, Ray, and KubeRay.

• Experience in containerizing and managing distributed caching, in-memory grids, compute and analytics engines, and messaging and streaming platforms.

• Extensive technical knowledge of containerized data services, AI engines, and orchestrators.

• Technical proficiency across OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, or Rancher RKE/RKS.

• Advanced skills in Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API, ArgoCD, and Flux.

🏝️ Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus.

• Competitive equity grant for new hires.

• Annual equity awards.

• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans.

• 401(K) participation with company matching.

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).

• Access to the Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Paid company holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

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