Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – AI & Developer Platform

Location: Rankin

Job Description
We are seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to serve as a technical authority, enterprise developer advocate, 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 to revolutionize how internal and external developer teams build, deploy, and scale AI-native applications on our core infrastructure.

As a Principal member of the core Engineering organization, you will operate at the intersection of Developer Experience (Dev Ex), API Architecture, and LLM/AI Platform Engineering. You will eliminate enterprise developer friction, author developer-facing APIs, SDKs, and reference implementations, and directly influence the multi-year technical roadmap for our AI and cloud-native software suite.

Unlike traditional pre-sales or post-sales roles, the Principal FDE functions as a senior extension of R&D in the field. Your mission is to establish world-class developer workflows, standardize LLM application delivery patterns, and build a high-bandwidth feedback loop that turns field innovations into platform features.

Key Responsibilities

Divisional Field-to-Engineering Authority:
Serve as the primary technical bridge between customer application developers, platform engineering teams, product managers, and C-level executive architects.

API & SDK Architecture:
Design, validate, and standardize enterprise-grade REST, gRPC, and GraphQL APIs, custom Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), and software development kits (SDKs) to streamline platform consumption.

Developer Workflows & Git Ops:
Establish end-to-end continuous delivery pipelines, Git Ops patterns (ArgoCD, Flux), and self-service developer portals to accelerate software iteration cycles from months to minutes.

Developer Advocacy & Tooling:
Build developer CLI tools, testing harnesses, and automation frameworks to reduce cognitive load for internal application teams adopting our vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platforms.

LLM Application

Infrastructure: Architect production-ready environments for real-time LLM inferencing, Agentic frameworks, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines on high-density GPU clusters.

AI Developer Tooling & APIs:
Standardize integration patterns for developer-facing AI frameworks (Lang Chain, Llama Index, Auto Gen, vLLM) and expose clean, enterprise-compliant API gateways for model serving.

Distributed AI Compute & Data Fabrics:
Set technical execution patterns for containerizing, orchestrating, and tuning high-throughput AI runtime engines (Ray, vLLM, SGLang, Spark) alongside vector databases and caching layers.

Hands-on Production Engineering:
Write production Go, Python, and Type Script code in the field—building platform operators, custom controllers, and AI wrappers—and upstream those contributions directly into core ISG product codebases.

Product Roadmap Influence:
Systematically translate developer friction points and field workarounds into concrete architectural requirements for VP/Director-level Product Managers.

Technical Mentorship:
Establish best-in-class API design practices, developer documentation standards, and code quality benchmarks across the broader FDE organization.

Key Qualifications

10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years driving Developer Experience (Dev Ex), API design, or AI platform architectures at scale.

Proven track record commanding technical credibility with C-suite leadership (CTOs, Chief AI Officers) while remaining deeply hands-on with staff-level software developers and systems engineers.

Authority-level mastery of API Design Principles (RESTful design, gRPC, OpenAPI…