Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

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

📋 Description

• Act as an esteemed technical expert, enterprise strategist, and leader bridging the gap between field operations and engineering within the Infrastructure Software Division.

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

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

• Architect, scale, and validate production-grade vSphere Kubernetes Service and VMware Cloud Foundation topologies.

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

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

• Engineer prototype integrations and develop production operators/CRDs to facilitate strategic accounts, contributing enhancements to core ISG codebases.

• Transform customer challenges, field solutions, and architectural frameworks into product requirements and roadmap priorities.

• Establish technical standards for containerizing, tuning, and orchestrating distributed systems including Kafka, Pulsar, vector databases, in-memory grids, and AI data/compute engines.

• Define integration strategies across different Kubernetes distributions.

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

• Mentor Senior and Staff FDEs.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering.

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

• A minimum of 17 years of related experience required.

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

• Mastery of Kubernetes internal mechanisms, CRDs, Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and GitOps architecture including ArgoCD and Flux.

• Extensive experience in architecting high-throughput AI inferencing pipelines and virtualized GPU environments, including NVIDIA vGPU, MIG, and GPUDirect RDMA.

• Familiarity with model serving frameworks such as vLLM, TGI, and Triton.

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

• Experience with Ray, vLLM, SGLang, LeaderWorkerSets, vLLM-Orchestrator, Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone, Apache Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Oracle Coherence, Hazelcast, Redis, Apache Ignite, Apache Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Dask, and Trino/Presto.

• Extensive experience in migrating enterprise monoliths, mainframe/bare metal environments, and isolated AI hardware deployments to zero-downtime cloud-native pathways.

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

• Technical fluency in OpenShift, EKS, GKE, AKS, Rancher RKE/RKS, and networking/storage technologies including CSI/CNI, RDMA, InfiniBand, and RoCEv2.

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

🏝️ 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).

• Paid company holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

• Paid Family Leave and other leave options in accordance with applicable laws.