About this role
About the Role The Senior Chief Architect is a high-impact, strategic leadership role responsible for directing the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function within our APAC AI Center of Excellence (CoE) in Singapore. Serving as a recognized global authority, you will operate at the intersection of business strategy, open-source communities, and deep software engineering to shape the technical direction of enterprise and sovereign AI initiatives across APAC. In this capacity, you will not only guide internal technical strategy but also serve as a prominent public leader, advocate, and governor within major open-source foundations and regional developer ecosystems. As the orchestrator of the FDE squad (comprising senior principal and dedicated engineers), you will bridge the gap between our customers’ production needs and our global product and ecosystem engineering hubs. You will act as an executive trusted advisor, leading co-innovation engagements with C-level executives in highly regulated sectors (such as Financial Services, Public Sector, and Utilities) to design resilient, future-proof, and fully compliant AI platforms. What You'll Do
- FDE Squad Orchestration & Technical Strategy: Provide technical leadership and operational direction to the Forward Deployed Engineering team. Own the technical qualification process for regional engagements and determine where to invest deep engineering resources.
- Architect Future-Proof Platforms: Drive the end-to-end technical strategy for large-scale hybrid cloud AI deployments. Define architectural patterns that ensure continuous availability, high performance, and rapid recovery in mission-critical environments.
- Overcome the "Integration Wall": Direct the design of complex integration layers—including custom identity access management, legacy data pipelines, and network isolation/air-gapped frameworks—to move client platforms from initial validation to scaled production.
- Global R&D Bridge & Community Stewardship: Act as the primary technical bridge to global product and ecosystem engineering hubs. Coordinate distributed development efforts to unblock regional AI product gaps, align on strategic partner blueprints (e.g., containerized inference runtimes and hardware-optimized configurations), and accelerate next-generation agentic frameworks. Upstream stewardship: maintain a community-first mindset, ensuring that up to 70% of the platform primitives and features built by the FDE squad are contributed back to global upstream open-source communities. What We're Looking For
- Proven leadership in Forward Deployed Engineering and enterprise AI platform architecture, ideally within APAC.
- Strong open-source engagement: contributions back to upstream communities and governance participation; ability to represent Red Hat in OSS ecosystems.
- Experience delivering large-scale hybrid cloud AI deployments; deep knowledge of IAM, data pipelines, network isolation, and security/compliance in regulated industries.
- Excellent stakeholder management with senior executives (C-level) and the ability to align regional and global roadmaps.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, and mentoring of multidisciplinary teams. Nice to Have
- Experience with containerized inference runtimes and hardware-optimized configurations.
- Prior OSS governance or leadership roles; experience working with container runtimes and accelerators. Compensation & Benefits
- Salary ranges and benefits are not disclosed in the posting but may be discussed during the interview process. Industry
- Software