About this role
About the Role Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) within the APAC AI Center of Excellence, working at the technical frontier of Enterprise and Sovereign AI. You will write production-grade code alongside our most strategic customers, design platform extensions, and help upstream innovations into open-source communities. What You'll Do
- Embed with strategic customers to resolve blockers (e.g., custom IAM/SSO, legacy data pipelines, network isolation).
- Architect future-proof solutions and influence multi-subsystem AI platform architectures.
- Establish and monitor testing practices for large-scale AI systems and ensure robust field integrations.
- Rapidly prototype secure platform integrations with customer data; validate distributed inference systems, RAG pipelines, and autonomous AI agents.
- Harden POCs and MVPs into scalable production architectures.
- Serve as global R&D bridge to harden field innovations into core products; collaborate across hubs and align partner blueprints.
- Lead community initiatives, monitor health, contribute upstream; participate in industry groups.
- Provide telemetry and performance feedback to optimize core guardrails and engine designs.
- Direct upstream contributions to core open-source projects; standardize regional solutions to avoid technical debt.
- Evolve SDLC practices and tooling to improve multi-team delivery.
- Mentor junior and principal engineers; drive business impact and strategic AI automation. What We're Looking For
- Deep capability in at least one track: Track A (Hardware Heterogeneity & Sovereign AI) or Track B (AI Platform Primitives & Distributed Systems).
- Strong engineering leadership with ability to embed with customers and influence across global teams.
- Expertise in hardware-accelerated inference, distributed systems, MLOps, and open-source software.
- Experience with enterprise deployments, secure on-premises stacks, and regulatory/compliance considerations.
- Proficiency in evaluating performance telemetry, security, and reliability in large-scale AI systems.
- Excellent collaboration, communication, and mentorship skills. Nice to Have
- Hands-on experience building hardware-optimized inference engines or kernel/runtime tuning for specialized NPUs/GPUs.
- Contributions to OSS projects, upstream governance experience, and involvement with AI/agentic frameworks.
- Familiarity with RAG pipelines, containerized runtimes, and distributed scheduler workloads.
- Experience with sovereign/edge deployments and privacy-respecting architectures. Compensation & Benefits
- Not disclosed