Principal Forward Deployed Engineer - Operational AI

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.

Global 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. 

 At 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.

If you're ready to shape the future of data, join us.

The Opportunity

As 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.

As 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.

This 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.

What You’ll Build

• Authoritative 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.
• Context 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.
• Execution Guardrails & Policy Enforcement: Embed deterministic boundaries, authorization checks, rate/execution governors, and human-in-the-loop triggers directly into distributed data and execution paths.
• Auditable 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.
• The Continuous Operating Loop: Build and tune closed-loop distributed systems: State → Context → Inference → Action → Consequence → State Mutation, ensuring deterministic execution at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Drive 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.
• Write Production Code: Write, optimize, and review high-performance code across Aerospike, distributed data backends, vector search runtimes, and agentic execution frameworks.
• Own 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.
• Rigorous 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.
• Influence 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.
• Technical 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.

How You’ll Lead (Staff/Principal IC Track)

• Architectural 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.
• Force Multiplier: Elevate senior and staff engineers across the team through design reviews, pair programming on complex distributed debugging sessions, and targeted technical mentorship.
• Cross-Organizational Impact: Partner seamlessly with Product, Core Database Engineering, Professional Services, and Solutions Architecture to resolve architectural misalignments and accelerate deployment velocity.
• Domain Advocacy: Distill real-world distributed agent failure modes into technical white papers, internal technical deep dives, and open-source tooling.

Operating Model with Client & Field Teams

Principal FDEs own the architecture, direct systems implementation, and end-to-end technical integrity of Operational AI deployments.

• Professional Services leads standard installations, migrations, cluster sizing, and infrastructure operations.
• Solutions Architecture & TAMs maintain long-term account governance, commercial alignment, and operational advisory.
• Your 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.

What You’ll Bring

• 10+ years of software engineering experience building and scaling high-performance distributed systems, database internals, or large-scale data infrastructure in production.
• Deep 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.
• Real-Time Data & Systems Design: Track record of designing systems with strict SLA targets (sub-10ms tail latency, high-throughput streaming, and robust consistency models).
• Applied AI & Agentic Infrastructure: Hands-on experience building low-latency context retrieval platforms, vector index optimizations, stateful agent runtimes, or deterministic workflow orchestration engines.
• Distributed Governance & Security: Practical knowledge of building zero-trust data access layers, cryptographic auditing, data isolation models, and distributed rate-limiting.
• Client-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.
• Independence & Execution Bias: Self-directed operator capable of taking an abstract concept from whitepaper or sketch through to battle-tested production software.

Helpful Experience

• Hands-on experience with the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform, Aerospike Vector Search (AVS), or Aerospike Graph.
• Experience with distributed coordination primitives (Raft, Paxos), durable event-driven systems (Kafka, Flink), or durable execution frameworks (Temporal).
• Familiarity with Linux kernel tuning, eBPF, zero-copy networking, or bare-metal performance optimization.
• Production experience with Kubernetes, hybrid-cloud networking, and Terraform.

Compensation and Impact

• Evaluation Metric: Success is driven by production deployments, platform adoption, reduction of architectural debt, and high-impact software assets—never billable hours or utilization percentages.
• Comprehensive Benefits (USA): Competitive base salary, significant equity participation, 401(k) matching, comprehensive medical/dental/vision coverage, and flexible remote work allowances.

Aerospike 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.

To 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. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.