Lead Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (10566)

Extreme Networks • Seattle, WA

15d • $180,000 - $210,000 • Hybrid

About The Position

Forward Deployed Engineers at Extreme are software engineers who work directly with strategic customers to jointly design, build, validate, and deploy solutions to complex business and technical problems using Extreme's products and platforms.
FDEs operate in real customer environments and own technical outcomes from discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment, and production readiness. The solutions they build must meet demanding requirements for scalability, security, reliability, observability, and operational safety.
This is a deeply technical and hands-on engineering organization. FDEs work directly with customers to understand complex problems and design, build, deploy, and stabilize production solutions using Extreme's products and platforms. They write production software, solve complex systems and integration problems, and own technical outcomes from solution design through production readiness. FDEs also identify platform gaps and define new feature requirements, working with Product teams to incorporate recurring customer needs into Extreme's products and platforms.
As a Lead Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, you will be a senior technical leader within the FDE organization, setting technical direction across Extreme's most complex customer engagements and shaping the architectures, engineering practices, and reusable capabilities that enable FDE to operate effectively at scale.
You will remain deeply hands-on, working directly with customer architects, principal engineers, engineering leaders, and technical teams on novel and difficult problems spanning intelligent networking, agentic AI, automation, enterprise integrations, data, distributed systems, and cloud and on-premises infrastructure.
Beyond individual engagements, you will identify patterns across customer environments, recognize systemic platform gaps, and turn field learning into reference architectures, reusable capabilities, engineering standards, and improvements to Extreme's products and platforms.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of experience across the software development lifecycle, including architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and production operations.
• Extensive hands-on software development experience with strong proficiency in one or more general-purpose programming languages such as Python, Java, Go, TypeScript, C#, or C++.
• Extensive experience architecting and delivering complex production systems across domains such as AI, automation, data, networking, enterprise integrations, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure.
• Demonstrated ability to solve highly ambiguous, cross-system technical problems where architecture or engineering approaches are not already established.
• Experience providing technical direction across multiple systems, teams, or significant engineering initiatives.
• Strong customer orientation and experience working directly with customer technical teams in complex enterprise environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, and risks to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to travel to customer sites as required by the engagement

Nice To Haves

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Machine Learning, or a related discipline.
• Deep experience building production generative AI or agentic systems involving tool use, retrieval, planning, orchestration, context management, evaluation, guardrails, and production operations.
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and modern agent frameworks.
• Experience with networking, network management, telemetry, observability, or distributed control systems.
• Experience with cloud-native infrastructure, container orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, and enterprise deployment patterns.
• Experience with enterprise identity, authorization, security, and data integration.
• Prior experience in Forward Deployed Engineering or another deeply technical customer-facing software engineering role.

Responsibilities

• Shape cross-engagement technical strategy, architecture, and engineering practices, including establishing reference architectures and technical standards that can be applied across the FDE organization.
• Lead critical architecture and engineering decisions for complex customer solutions spanning applications, AI systems, data, APIs, integrations, networking, security, infrastructure, and production operations.
• Remain deeply hands-on, writing production-quality software and solving novel or high-risk engineering problems.
• Serve as a senior technical escalation point for complex engineering and production-readiness challenges across FDE engagements.
• Identify recurring patterns across customer environments and turn them into reusable architectures, components, integrations, tools, skills, automation, and other capabilities that accelerate future deployments.
• Identify systemic platform gaps and define new feature requirements, working with Product teams to incorporate recurring customer needs into Extreme's products and platforms.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical and engineering bar across the FDE organization.

Benefits

• Equal Employment Opportunity
• Consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.
• Affirmative action to employ and advance in employment qualified protected veterans, including disabled veterans, recently separated veterans, active-duty wartime or campaign badge veterans, and Armed Forces service medal veterans.
• Commitment to preventing subtler forms of inappropriate behavior like stereotyping.
• Encouragement for people from underrepresented groups to apply.
• Consideration of qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with various Fair Chance Acts and Ordinances.
• Opportunity to respond before any adverse action is taken following an individualized assessment.
• No salary history information sought or relied upon in determining employment offers or compensation.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior