Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in New York, +2 more states.

📋 Description

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

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

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

• Design, scale, and validate production-grade VKS and VCF architectures.

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

• Lead comprehensive migration strategies from legacy bare metal systems and disjointed AI workloads to cloud-native Kubernetes targets.

• Develop prototype integrations and construct production operators/CRDs to facilitate strategic accounts.

• Contribute upstream to core ISG codebases from the field.

• Convert customer challenges and field observations into product specifications and influence the technical roadmap.

• Establish technical standards for containerization, optimization, and orchestration of distributed systems, data platforms, and AI engines.

• Define integration strategies across various Kubernetes distributions.

• Set deployment standards, GitOps frameworks, and CAPI/Operator patterns.

• Mentor Senior and Staff FDEs and enhance overall FDE execution capabilities.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in software engineering.

• More than 5 years of experience in driving significant infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or large-scale Kubernetes architectures.

• Demonstrated ability to establish technical credibility with C-suite executives while remaining engaged in production code.

• Mastery of Kubernetes internal operations, CRDs, Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and GitOps architecture (ArgoCD, Flux) at an authority level.

• Extensive background 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.

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

• Practical experience with development in 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; relevant years of experience may be accepted in lieu of a degree.

• A minimum of 17 years of related experience is required.

🏝️ 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).

• Company-paid holidays.

• Paid sick leave.

• Vacation time.

• Paid Family Leave and other leaves of absence according to applicable laws.