Forward Deployed Engineer; Principal

Job Description:

Position Description
We are seeking aForward Deployed Engineer (Principal) to serve as an elite technical authority, enterprise strategist, and field to engineering leader across the Infrastructure Software Division (ISG). In this high impact role, you will embed with our largest, most complex enterprise accounts during critical platform modernizations, bare metal re platforming, large scale stateful workload migrations, and mission critical AI inferencing deployments.

As a Principal member of the core Engineering organization, you will operate at the intersection of enterprise architecture, hands on production code, and long term product strategy. You will tackle systemic architecture blockers in high stakes environments, author reference implementations, and directly influence the multi year technical roadmap of our core infrastructure and AI platform software.

Unlike traditional pre sales, professional services, or post sales support roles, the Principal FDE functions as a senior extension of R&D in the field. Your mission is to eliminate enterprise adoption friction at scale, codify repeatable deployment patterns for modern workloads (including distributed AI models), and establish a high bandwidth feedback loop that turns field innovations directly into core software capabilities.

• Divisional Field to Engineering Leadership: Act as the primary technical authority bridging core engineering, product management executive leadership, and C level enterprise customer architects.
• Strategic Architecture & Reference Design: Architect, scale, and validate production grade vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) topologies for high consequence, mission critical, and highly regulated deployments.
• Enterprise AI & Distributed Inferencing Acceleration: Design and deploy production systems for real time LLM inferencing, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, and distributed AI runtime frameworks across high density GPU clusters.
• Large Scale Migration Strategy: Lead end to end technical migration strategies transitioning massive legacy bare metal systems, risk calculation platforms, heavy stateful engines, and fragmented AI workloads to unified cloud native Kubernetes targets.
• Mission Critical Problem Solving & Code Contribution: Directly engineer high value prototype integrations, write production operators/CRDs in the field to unblock strategic accounts, and upstream those contributions directly into core ISG codebases.
• Product Strategy & Roadmap Influence: Systematically synthesize complex customer pain points, field workarounds, and architectural patterns into concrete product requirements. Partner with VP/Director level Product Managers to prioritize features that shorten software iteration cycles from months to days across the global product suite.
• Complex Stateful & AI Data Fabric: Set technical patterns for containerizing, tuning, and orchestrating heavy distributed systems, including streaming platforms (Kafka, Pulsar), vector databases (Milvus, Qdrant), in memory grids (Coherence, Redis), and advanced AI data/compute engines (Ray, vLLM, Spark, Flink).
• Multi Cloud & Competitive Interoperability: Define cross platform integration strategies for clients operating mixed environments across competing distributions (Red Hat Open Shift, EKS, GKE, AKS, Rancher).
• Technical Mentorship & Practice Building: Establish best in class deployment standards, Git Ops frameworks, and CAPI/Operator patterns across the broader FDE organization; mentor Senior and Staff FDEs to elevate team wide execution capabilities.

• Principal Level Engineering Stature: 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years driving high consequence infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or Kubernetes architectures onstrated alignment with core R&D/Product Engineering organizations.
• Strategic Customer Authority: Proven ability to command technical credibility with C suite stakeholders (CTOs, VP of Infra, Chief AI Officers) while remaining deeply hands on in production code with staff level customer engineers.
• Deep Kubernetes & Cloud Native Primitives: Authority level mastery of Kubernetes internal mechanics, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Kubernetes Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and Git Ops architecture (ArgoCD, Flux).
• AI & GPU Infrastructure Fluency: Extensive experience architecting high throughput AI inferencing pipelines, virtualized GPU environments (NVIDIA…