{"id":4107202,"url":"https://alion.io/job/aerospike-principal-forward-deployed-engineer-operational-ai","title":"Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, Operational AI","company":{"id":1792229,"name":"Aerospike","domain":"aerospike.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/aerospike","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":null},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Aerospike","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":false},{"name":"C++","optional":false},{"name":"eBPF","optional":false},{"name":"Flink","optional":false},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":false},{"name":"Java","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Rust","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"Zero Trust","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-11T21:19:05Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-11","last_verified_at":"2026-11-11T22:45:49Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":0,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":0},"description":"Aerospike is the real-time database for mission-critical use cases and workloads, including machine learning, generative, and agentic AI. Aerospike powers millions of transactions per second with millisecond latency, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership compared to other databases.\nGlobal leaders, including Adobe, Airtel, Barclays, Criteo, DBS Bank, Experian, Grab, HDFC Bank, PayPal, Sony Interactive Entertainment, The Trade Desk, and Wayfair, rely on Aerospike for customer 360, fraud detection, real-time bidding, profile stores, recommendation engines, and other use cases.\nAt Aerospike, we dream big and deliver even bigger. Our mission is to unleash the power of the world’s real-time data with a database built for infinite scale, speed, and sustainability.\nIf you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.\nThe Opportunity\nAs AI transitions from analysis into real-world autonomous action, enterprises require more than intelligent models-they need an ultra-low-latency operational fabric that connects agent swarms and workflows directly to live reality. That requires authoritative state, unified context, and enterprise-grade policy controls.\nAs a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) at Aerospike, you will serve as the hands-on technical authority partnering with lead architects and engineering teams across Global 2000 enterprises. You will own the technical architecture and end-to-end implementation of mission-critical systems: discovering deep architectural challenges, writing core production code, validating high-throughput workloads, and driving post-production operational resilience.\nThis is a premier individual contributor (IC) role. You will bridge customer production deployments with Aerospike’s core product and platform engineering teams, translating novel distributed systems challenges into reusable platform patterns, hardened reference architectures, and foundational product features.\nWhat You’ll Build\nAuthoritative State Engines: Architect and implement real-time distributed foundations for session, entity, workflow, and multi-agent state. Support massive concurrent reads/writes under stringent SLA guarantees for data freshness, consistency, and sub-millisecond recovery.\nContext Assembly Pipelines: Design systems that merge enterprise records, streaming state, low-latency vector search, and graph topologies to provide grounded, permission-aware context for autonomous decisions.\nExecution Guardrails & Policy Enforcement: Embed deterministic boundaries, authorization checks, rate/execution governors, and human-in-the-loop triggers directly into distributed data and execution paths.\nAuditable Governance & Traceability: Build immutable telemetry and lineage pipelines that capture runtime context, decisions, downstream side-effects, and state mutations to meet enterprise security and compliance standards.\nThe Continuous Operating Loop: Build and tune closed-loop distributed systems: State → Context → Inference → Action → Consequence → State Mutation, ensuring deterministic execution at scale.\nWhat You’ll Do\nDrive System Architecture: Embed with enterprise staff/principal engineers and platform owners to break ambiguous, high-scale operational requirements into concrete systems designs, data schemas, and verifiable milestones.\nWrite Production Code: Write, optimize, and review high-performance code across Aerospike, distributed data backends, vector search runtimes, and agentic execution frameworks.\nOwn Technical Outcomes: Drive full-lifecycle validation in client staging and production environments. Troubleshoot concurrency bottlenecks, memory leaks, cluster failovers, and serialization overhead under extreme workloads.\nRigorous Systems Benchmarking: Design and execute performance profiles testing tail latency (p99p99p99/p99.9p99.9p99.9), throughput limits, cross-region replication lag, vector recall, and fallback reliability under active network partitions.\nInfluence Platform Roadmap: Function as the primary bridge back to internal core engineering. Extract reusable components, build field libraries and toolchains, and author standard-setting reference architectures.\nTechnical Thought Leadership: Serve as a domain expert on real-time operational AI. Present architectural trade-offs to senior client leadership, write definitive implementation guides, and mentor partner engineering teams.\nHow You’ll Lead (Staff/Principal IC Track)\nArchitectural Anchor: Act as the technical North Star for forward deployed engineering, setting standards for code quality, design documentation, and production readiness across high-value client projects.\nForce Multiplier: Elevate senior and staff engineers across the team through design reviews, pair programming on complex distributed debugging sessions, and targeted technical mentorship.\nCross-Organizational Impact: Partner seamlessly with Product, Core Database Engineering, Professional Services, and Solutions Architecture to resolve architectural misalignments and accelerate deployment velocity.\nDomain Advocacy: Distill real-world distributed agent failure modes into technical white papers, internal technical deep dives, and open-source tooling.\nOperating Model with Client & Field Teams\nPrincipal FDEs own the architecture, direct systems implementation, and end-to-end technical integrity of Operational AI deployments.\nProfessional Services leads standard installations, migrations, cluster sizing, and infrastructure operations.\nSolutions Architecture & TAMs maintain long-term account governance, commercial alignment, and operational advisory.\nYour Focus: You remain unburdened by routine implementation, maintenance tickets, or account management. Your remit is solving the hardest distributed computing and operational AI problems, deploying working code, and hardening our software for enterprise-scale adoption.\nWhat You’ll Bring\n10+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling high-performance distributed systems, database internals, or large-scale data infrastructure in production.\nDeep Systems Programming: Proven expertise in Go, C/C++, Java, or Rust, with an understanding of memory management, lock-free data structures, networking protocols, cache hierarchies, and concurrent systems programming.\nReal-Time Data & Systems Design: Track record of designing systems with strict SLA targets (sub-10ms tail latency, high-throughput streaming, and robust consistency models).\nApplied AI & Agentic Infrastructure: Hands-on experience building low-latency context retrieval platforms, vector index optimizations, stateful agent runtimes, or deterministic workflow orchestration engines.\nDistributed Governance & Security: Practical knowledge of building zero-trust data access layers, cryptographic auditing, data isolation models, and distributed rate-limiting.\nClient-Facing Technical Leadership: Demonstrated poise and clarity when working with customer engineering leaders, with the ability to cut through ambiguity and make high-judgment technical tradeoffs on the fly.\nIndependence & Execution Bias: Self-directed operator capable of taking an abstract concept from whitepaper or sketch through to battle-tested production software.\nHelpful Experience\nHands-on experience with the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform, Aerospike Vector Search (AVS), or Aerospike Graph.\nExperience with distributed coordination primitives (Raft, Paxos), durable event-driven systems (Kafka, Flink), or durable execution frameworks (Temporal).\nFamiliarity with Linux kernel tuning, eBPF, zero-copy networking, or bare-metal performance optimization.\nProduction experience with Kubernetes, hybrid-cloud networking, and Terraform.\nCompensation and Impact\nEvaluation Metric: Success is driven by production deployments, platform adoption, reduction of architectural debt, and high-impact software assets-never billable hours or utilization percentages.\nComprehensive Benefits (USA): Competitive base salary, significant equity participation, 401(k) matching, comprehensive medical/dental/vision coverage, and flexible remote work allowances.\nAerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status.\nTo keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. 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