{"id":3482543,"url":"https://alion.io/job/hcltech-principal-engineer-9","title":"Principal Engineer","company":{"id":225,"name":"HCLTech","domain":"hcltech.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/hcltech","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"services","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SuccessFactors","truth_index":null},"role":"Industrial Engineering","role_family":"Industrial Engineering","seniority":"lead","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Santa Clara, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":127000,"max_usd":257000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":1961},"experience_years_min":12,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Ansible","optional":false},{"name":"Bash","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"GitOps","optional":false},{"name":"HPC","optional":false},{"name":"InfiniBand","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Linux","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"NCCL","optional":false},{"name":"NVLink","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"SLURM","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT-LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Triton","optional":false},{"name":"vLLM","optional":false},{"name":"TensorRT","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-29T20:33:05Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-29","last_verified_at":"2026-11-07T07:34:56Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":8,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":8},"description":"Job Summary\nJob Title: Principal Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Factory (Infrastructure) - NVIDIA Ecosystem Business Unit\nTeam: Leads the infrastructure workstream of an AI Factory FDE pod; works with the Platform and AI Software Principal and the pod's FDE III engineers\nTravel: travel as required to client sites and data centers; indicative 40-60%\nRole Summary\nHCLTech is seeking a Principal Forward Deployed Engineer to own the physical and fabric layer of client AI Factories on NVIDIA platforms. The Principal takes the solution architect's reference design to detailed design, owns site readiness and acceptance with the OEM and NVIDIA, and leads bring-up and validation of GPU clusters across the pod's engagements, handing over a scheduler-ready factory. The role also coaches FDE III and FDE II engineers and sets infrastructure standards for the bench.\nKey Responsibilities\nKey Responsibilities\nAI Factory Build & Deployment\nDeploy the AI Factory infrastructure stack (Hopper and Blackwell class compute, NVLink and NVSwitch, InfiniBand / Spectrum-X fabrics, BlueField DPUs, storage for AI) to the architect-approved NVIDIA reference design\nLead bare-metal bring-up and system software: firmware, drivers, OS images, BCM / Mission Control, NVLink partitioning\nConfigure and tune InfiniBand / RoCE fabrics and high-performance storage to the approved design\nRun cluster validation (NCCL, HPL, burn-in), telemetry and XID troubleshooting; isolate faults across network, firmware and scheduler layers\nSite Readiness & Acceptance\nCheck power, cooling and rack-layout readiness against the sizing; flag gaps found on site\nRun acceptance testing with the OEM and NVIDIA and produce validation evidence\nProduce as-built documentation and operable runbooks\nAutomation\nBuild and maintain bring-up automation (Ansible, Python, Bash) and firmware lifecycle tooling for repeatable builds\nClient & Team Collaboration\nHand over a scheduler-ready cluster to the pod's platform FDEs with agreed interfaces\nBrief client technical teams; contribute technical inputs to presales scoping and estimates\nConvert each engagement into reusable bring-up checklists and blueprints\nTechnical Leadership & Ownership (Principal)\nOwn detailed design (L1 to L0) from the solution architect's reference architecture, sized for workload, power and cooling\nOwn site readiness and acceptance with the OEM and NVIDIA; sign off cluster readiness\nLead the infrastructure workstream across the pod's engagements; resolve the hardest cross-layer faults with NVIDIA and OEM engineering\nCoach and review FDE III and FDE II engineers; set bring-up and validation standards\nEngage client infrastructure leadership and NVIDIA counterparts\nSkill Requirements\n\nDomain\n\nTarget level\n\nWhat this domain covers\n\nAI infrastructure & systems\n\n4 - Expert\n\nPhysical and fabric layer of the AI Factory: GPU servers and rack-scale systems, InfiniBand / RoCE networking, high-performance storage, firmware and bare-metal bring-up, cluster validation and fault isolation.\n\nPlatform, orchestration & inference\n\n3 - Proficient\n\nSoftware layer that makes the cluster usable: Kubernetes and SLURM scheduling, GPU sharing and quotas, multi-tenancy, cluster management (BCM, Run:ai), and model serving (NIM, vLLM, Triton, TensorRT-LLM) tuned for latency, throughput and cost per token.\n\nDevOps & control-plane scripting\n\n3 - Proficient\n\nAutomation of the factory lifecycle: infrastructure-as-code, GitOps, CI/CD, provisioning and tenant-onboarding scripts, operators and APIs, observability as code.\n\nData & applied AI\n\n2 - Working\n\nData pipelines and use-case delivery on the factory: fine-tuning, RAG and agentic workflows, evaluation and guardrails.\n\nSecurity, governance & sovereignty\n\n3 - Proficient\n\nSecuring and governing the factory: RBAC and tenant isolation, secrets management, hardening, audit, confidential computing, data residency, sovereign and air-gapped builds.\n\nPresales & client engagement\n\n3 - Proficient\n\nPresales and client-embedded delivery: technical scoping inputs, client technical sessions, TCO inputs, as-built documentation, and handover to Delivery Teams.\n\nOther Requirements\nRequired Skills & Experience\n12+ years of experience, including 5+ years deploying or operating GPU / HPC infrastructure\nHands-on InfiniBand or RoCEv2 / RDMA configuration and tuning\n Bare-metal provisioning experience (MAAS, BCM, Redfish / BMC) and Linux at depth\nAutomation skills (Ansible, Python, Bash) for repeatable bring-up\nComfortable debugging across network, firmware and scheduler layers under client pressure\nClient-facing experience; comfortable working on-site in client data centers\nRecord of designing and leading GPU cluster builds, including OEM acceptance, and of leading engineers on multi-month deployments\nPreferred\n NVIDIA-Certified Associate / Professional credentials (AI infrastructure and operations)\nExperience with rack-scale systems (GB200 / GB300 NVL72) and Mission Control\nParallel file systems or AI-tier storage (Ceph, WEKA, VAST, DDN)\nPower and liquid-cooling fundamentals for GPU data centers\nSLURM or Run:ai administration; CKAKey Performance Indicators\nCluster builds delivered on schedule and passing validation (NCCL, burn-in) at first attempt\nTime from hardware arrival to first production workload\nAcceptance sign-off with the OEM and NVIDIA without rework\nDefects and escalations after handover\nReusable bring-up assets contributed per engagement\nNVIDIA certifications completed against the agreed path","description_format":"text","description_chars":5497,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":12,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Cybersecurity","Professional Services","Science & Engineering","Systems Integrators"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-29T20:33:05Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":98,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.976,"p_room":1,"age_days":8,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:3","wave","velocity","win:early","comp:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-11-07T05:47:08Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/hcltech-principal-engineer-9","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/hcltech-principal-engineer-9.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-07T13:29:06Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":16372,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-08T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":225},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=225"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fhcltech-principal-engineer-9"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fhcltech-principal-engineer-9"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fhcltech-principal-engineer-9"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/hcltech-principal-engineer-9\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fhcltech-principal-engineer-9"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3482543}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"hcltech.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3482543},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); 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