Forward Deployed Engineer (Principal)

## Join Broadcom's Infrastructure Software Division as a Forward Deployed Engineer (Principal) This is not a typical pre-sales, professional services, or support role. As a Principal member of core Engineering, you will embed directly 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. You will operate at the intersection of enterprise architecture, hands-on production code, and long-term product strategy, tackling systemic blockers in high-stakes environments and directly influencing our multi-year technical roadmap. ### Your Impact You will act as the primary technical authority bridging core engineering, product management, and C-level customer architects. 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 into core software capabilities. Key areas of focus include: - Architecting and validating production-grade v. Sphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) topologies for high-consequence, mission-critical, and highly regulated deployments. - Designing and deploying production systems for real-time LLM inferencing, Retrieval - Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, and distributed AI runtime frameworks across high-density GPU clusters. - Leading end-to-end migration strategies for massive legacy bare-metal systems, risk calculation platforms, heavy stateful engines, and fragmented AI workloads to unified cloud-native Kubernetes targets. - Directly engineering high-value prototype integrations, writing production operators and CRDs in the field to unblock strategic accounts, and upstreaming those contributions into core ISG codebases. - Synthesizing customer pain points, field workarounds, and architectural patterns into concrete product requirements, partnering with VP/Director-level Product Managers to prioritize features that shorten iteration cycles from months to days. - Setting 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, v. LLM, Spark, Flink). - Defining cross-platform integration strategies for clients operating mixed environments across Red Hat Open. Shift, EKS, GKE, AKS, Rancher, and other distributions. - Establishing best-in-class deployment standards, Git. Ops frameworks, and CAPI/Operator patterns across the broader FDE organization and mentoring Senior and Staff FDEs. ### Who We're Looking For You need principal-level engineering stature — 10+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years driving high-consequence infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or Kubernetes architectures at scale, aligned with core R&D/Product Engineering organizations. Overall, 17+ years of related experience is required; a Bachelor's degree is preferred but relevant experience may be considered in lieu of a degree. You must have proven ability to command technical credibility with C-suite stakeholders while staying deeply hands-on in production code alongside staff-level customer engineers. Authority-level mastery of Kubernetes internals, CRDs, Operators, Cluster API (CAPI), and Git. Ops (Argo. CD, Flux) is essential. Extensive experience architecting high-throughput AI inferencing pipelines, virtualized GPU environments (NVIDIA v. GPU, MIG, GPUDirect RDMA), model serving frameworks (v. LLM, TGI, Triton), and distributed inference topologies is expected. You should have a proven track record architecting and running high-throughput, low-latency stateful workloads on Kubernetes, especially with: - AI Serving & Distributed Compute: Ray, v. LLM, SGLang, Leader. Worker. Sets (LWS), v. LLM - Orchestrator - Vector & No. SQL Databases: Milvus, Qdrant, Pinecone, Apache Cassandra, Scylla. DB - In - Memory & Caching: Oracle Coherence, Hazelcast, Redis, Apache Ignite - Messaging & Streaming: Apache Kafka, Rabbit. MQ, Pulsar - Data & Analytics Engines: Apache Spark, Apache Flink, Dask, Trino/Presto Deep experience untangling complex enterprise monoliths, mainframe/bare-metal environments, and siloed AI hardware deployments to construct seamless zero-downtime migration pathways is required. Hands-on proficiency in Go, Python, or Java for systems-level infrastructure, Kubernetes controllers, custom AI wrappers, or automation frameworks is expected. Comprehensive technical fluency across competing enterprise distributions and their networking and storage abstractions (CSI/CNI, RDMA, Infini. Band, Ro. CEv2) is also necessary. ### Compensation and Benefits The annual base salary range for this position is USD $132,200 to $211,500. As a valued team member, you'll be eligible for a discretionary annual bonus and competitive new hire equity grants, plus annual equity awards that connect your success directly to the company's growth. All subject to relevant plan documents and award agreements. Broadcom offers a comprehensive benefits package including 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, and vacation time. The company follows all applicable laws for Paid Family Leave and other leaves of absence. Broadcom is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, disability status, medical condition, pregnancy, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records consistent with local law. --- _This job was found on [bandana.com](https://www.bandana.com/?utm_source=jd_attribution&utm_medium=repost)_