Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – AI, Developer Platform

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

📋 Description

• Act as a technical expert, advocate for enterprise developers, and a leader connecting field operations to engineering within the Infrastructure Software Division.

• Collaborate with complex enterprise accounts to enhance the development, deployment, and scaling of AI-native applications by developer teams.

• Serve as a link between customer application developers, platform engineering teams, product managers, and executive architects.

• Design, validate, and standardize REST, gRPC, and GraphQL APIs, Kubernetes CRDs, and SDKs.

• Create continuous delivery pipelines, implement GitOps patterns using ArgoCD and Flux, and establish self-service developer portals.

• Develop CLI tools, testing frameworks, and automation systems to facilitate VKS and VCF platform adoption.

• Architect production environments for real-time LLM inferencing, agentic frameworks, and RAG pipelines utilizing GPU clusters.

• Standardize integrations for LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, and vLLM while providing enterprise-compliant model-serving API gateways.

• Define execution strategies for containerizing, orchestrating, and optimizing AI runtime engines in conjunction with vector databases and caching layers.

• Write production-level code in Go, Python, and TypeScript, including platform operators, custom controllers, and AI wrappers.

• Contribute upstream to core ISG product codebases from field experiences.

• Convert developer challenges and field workarounds into architectural requirements for product managers.

• Establish API design principles, developer documentation, and code quality standards throughout the FDE organization.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering.

• At least 5 years of experience in driving Developer Experience (DevEx), API design, or AI platform architectures at scale.

• Demonstrated technical credibility with C-suite executives while maintaining hands-on involvement with software developers and systems engineers.

• Mastery of RESTful API design, gRPC, OpenAPI specifications, and API Gateway integration at authority level.

• In-depth understanding of Kubernetes internals, custom controllers, CRDs, Operator patterns, and Cluster API (CAPI).

• Expertise in GitOps workflows and infrastructure-as-code automation.

• Practical experience in building or supporting LLM/Generative AI application stacks.

• Familiarity with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, Semantic Kernel, Ray, vLLM, SGLang, and Triton Inference Server.

• Experience with vector databases and search technologies, including Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone, pgvector, and Weaviate.

• Proficiency with Apache Kafka, Redis, Pulsar, Apache Spark, and Flink.

• Experience in integrating virtualized GPU workloads such as NVIDIA vGPU, MIG, and GPUDirect RDMA.

• Advanced skills in Go, Python, and TypeScript/Node.js.

• Familiarity with EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, and Rancher.

• Experience with standard application networking and storage abstractions.

• A total of over 17 years of professional experience in technical software roles is required.

• A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field is preferred; relevant years of equivalent experience will be considered in lieu of a degree.

🏝️ Benefits

• Discretionary annual bonus.

• Competitive equity grant for new hires.

• Annual equity awards.

• Medical, dental, and vision plans.

• Participation in RRSP with company matching.

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Company-paid holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

• Leaves of absence in accordance with applicable laws.