Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (AI & Developer Platform)

Quick Facts

• Role: Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (AI & Developer Platform)
• Focus: Developer Experience, API/SDK leadership, and LLM/AI platform engineering

Description

Serve as a senior field-to-engineering technical authority to improve how developers build, deploy, and scale AI-native applications on enterprise infrastructure. You will lead developer workflow standardization (APIs, SDKs, GitOps, portals) and architect LLM inference and RAG pipelines on high-density GPU clusters. This is a hands-on position that turns field feedback into platform roadmap inputs while contributing production code.

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary technical bridge between customer application developers, platform engineering, product managers, and executive architects.
• Design and standardize enterprise REST, gRPC, and GraphQL APIs, OpenAPI specs, API gateway integration, and Kubernetes CRDs/operators.
• Establish end-to-end continuous delivery using GitOps patterns (ArgoCD, Flux) and self-service developer portals.
• Build developer tooling (CLIs, testing harnesses, automation frameworks) to reduce adoption friction for vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF).
• Architect production-ready environments for real-time LLM inferencing, agentic frameworks, and RAG pipelines on GPU clusters.
• Standardize AI developer integration patterns for frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, AutoGen, vLLM) and expose clean enterprise-compliant API gateways for model serving.
• Define technical execution patterns for containerizing/orchestrating/tuning high-throughput AI runtimes (Ray, vLLM, SGLang, Spark), including vector databases and caching.
• Write production Go, Python, and TypeScript code in the field (operators/controllers, platform operators, AI wrappers) and upstream contributions.
• Translate developer friction into architectural requirements that influence product roadmap decisions.
• Mentor on API design practices, developer documentation standards, and code-quality benchmarks.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in DevEx, API design, or AI platform architecture at scale
• Credible technical leadership with experience working with C-level leadership while remaining hands-on
• Authority-level expertise in REST/gRPC/OpenAPI API design and API gateway integration
• Deep Kubernetes knowledge (controllers, CRDs, Operator patterns, Cluster API)
• Experience establishing GitOps workflows and infrastructure-as-code automation
• Hands-on experience with LLM/GenAI application stacks, including frameworks and orchestration
• Experience with vector databases/search and streaming/caching components used in AI pipelines
• Advanced proficiency in Go, Python, and TypeScript/Node.js
• Fluency with multi-cloud enterprise Kubernetes distributions (EKS, GKE, AKS, OpenShift, Rancher)
• 17+ years total professional experience in technical software roles (degree preferred)

Benefits

• CAD 115,600 to CAD 185,000 annual base salary
• Discretionary annual bonus
• Competitive new-hire equity grant and annual equity awards
• Medical, dental and vision plans
• RRSP participation with company matching
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Company-paid holidays; paid sick leave and vacation time