Lead Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Salary Range: 180000 to 210000 (Currency: USD) (Pay period: per-year-salary)

Over 50,000 customers globally trust our end-to-end, cloud-driven networking solutions. They rely on our top-rated services and support to accelerate their digital transformation efforts and deliver unprecedented progress.

Become part of something big with Extreme! As a global networking leader, learn why there is no better time to join the Extreme team.

Position details

Title of position:  Lead Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer

Position type: Full time - Hybrid

Location:  Seattle, WA

Position reports to: Director of Software Systems Engineering

Application deadline: Applications are being accepted on a rolling basis and this posting will remain open until filled.

Work authorization: We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa, including H-1B visas, at this time 

Scope:

Are you energized by solving complex, high-impact problems directly with customers? Do you want to turn emerging technologies in intelligent networking, generative AI, agentic systems, automation, and cloud platforms into production solutions? Do you want what you build and learn in the field to help shape capabilities that benefit customers at scale?

Then come advance with us.

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.

About the Role

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.

Key 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.

Basic Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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.

Equal Employment Opportunity

1. Extreme Networks, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran. We are committed to taking 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.
2. Extreme Networks also strives to prevent other, subtler forms of inappropriate behavior (for example, stereotyping) from ever gaining a foothold in our organization. Whether blatant or hidden, barriers to success have no place at Extreme Networks. We encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.

Fair chance and background checks

• Extreme Networks will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the California Fair Chance Act, Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, Philadelphia Fair Criminal Record Screening Standards Ordinance, Illinois Human Rights Act, Cook County Human Rights Ordinance, Seattle Fair Chance Employment Ordinance, and the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance. An applicant's conviction history will not be considered until after a conditional offer of employment has been made. Following any individualized assessment, applicants will be provided with the opportunity to respond before any adverse action is taken.
• Extreme Networks does not seek salary history information from applicants and will not rely on salary history in determining whether to offer employment or in setting compensation.