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 (DevEx), 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 & GitOps: Establish end-to-end continuous delivery pipelines, GitOps 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 (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, 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 TypeScript 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 (DevEx), 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 specifications, API Gateway integration).
- Deep understanding of Kubernetes internal mechanics, custom controllers, Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs), Operator patterns, and Cluster API (CAPI).
- Proficiency in establishing GitOps workflows and infrastructure-as-code automation.
- Hands-on experience building or supporting LLM/Generative AI application stacks: Frameworks & Orchestration: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Haystack, Semantic Kernel, Ray, vLLM, SGLang, Triton Inference Server. Vector Databases & Search: Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone, pgvector, Weaviate. Streaming & Caching: Apache Kafka, Redis, Pulsar, Apache Spark, Flink.
- Experience integrating virtualized GPU workloads (NVIDIA vGPU, MIG, GPUDirect RDMA) into developer-accessible API primitives.
- Advanced proficiency in Go, Python, and TypeScript/Node.js for systems-level development, custom controller authorship, API microservices, and AI workflow integration.
- Comprehensive fluency across multi-cloud enterprise Kubernetes distributions (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift

📌 Principal Forward Deployed Engineer – AI (Rankin Inlet)
🏢 FDE Times
📍 Rankin Inlet