Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

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

📋 Description

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

• Collaborate closely with large, complex enterprise clients during platform modernizations, bare-metal replatforming, stateful workload migrations, and AI inferencing implementations.

• Serve as a liaison between core engineering teams, product management, executive leadership, and C-level enterprise customer architects.

• Design, scale, and validate production-grade vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) architectures.

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

• Lead comprehensive migration strategies for legacy bare-metal systems, risk assessment platforms, stateful engines, and AI workloads to cloud-native Kubernetes environments.

• Engineer prototype integrations and create production operators/CRDs in the field, contributing upstream to core ISG codebases.

• Transform customer pain points and field trends into product requirements, collaborating with Product Managers on roadmap prioritization.

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

• Define integration strategies across various Kubernetes and cloud distributions.

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

• Provide mentorship to Senior and Staff FDEs.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering.

• More than 5 years of experience leading high-stakes infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or Kubernetes architectures at scale.

• A total of 17+ years of relevant experience required.

• A Bachelor’s degree is preferred; however, equivalent years of experience may be accepted in lieu of a degree.

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

• Expert-level understanding of Kubernetes internal mechanics, CRDs, Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and GitOps architecture, including ArgoCD and Flux.

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

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

• In-depth experience with AI serving and distributed compute technologies such as Ray, vLLM, SGLang, LeaderWorkerSets (LWS), and vLLM-Orchestrator.

• Familiarity with vector and NoSQL databases including Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone, Apache Cassandra, and ScyllaDB.

• Knowledge of in-memory and caching technologies like Oracle Coherence, Hazelcast, Redis, and Apache Ignite.

• Proficiency with messaging and streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, and Pulsar.

• Experience with data and analytics engines including Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Dask, and Trino/Presto.

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

• Hands-on development experience in Go, Python, or Java for systems-level infrastructure, Kubernetes controllers, custom AI wrappers, or automation frameworks.

• Technical proficiency across OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, Rancher RKE/RKS, and networking/storage abstractions such as CSI/CNI, RDMA, InfiniBand, and RoCEv2.

🏝️ 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).

• Employee Assistance Program (EAP).

• Paid company holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

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