Forward Deployed Engineering - Portworx

THE ROLE

Portworx is building a Forward Deployed Engineering team to embed directly with our most strategic customers during their highest-stakes Kubernetes storage deployments. You'll be the technical bridge between complex customer infrastructure and Portworx itself: shaping production architectures, advising through critical rollouts, and turning field experience into structured product feedback that shapes our roadmap.

This is a consultative role. The customer's teams operate their own environment; your job is to make sure the decisions they make are the right ones. That means the value you bring is judgment and depth rather than execution: knowing which architecture holds under load and failure, which assumptions in a proposed design are wrong, and what a given storage fabric, hypervisor estate, or network topology will and won't support.

Most of this work sits in the customer's own data center. Our largest and most complex deployments run on customer-owned compute, Fibre Channel and IP storage fabrics, established virtualization estates, and enterprise network designs that predate Kubernetes by a decade. You need to be genuinely conversant below the Kubernetes layer, at the server, the HBA, the switch, and the array, because that is where these deployments succeed or fail and where the customer's infrastructure leaders will test whether you're worth listening to.

This is not a support role and not a pure pre-sales role. You'll own engagements end-to-end: from solution validation before you ever get on a plane, through architecture design, production readiness, and a clean handoff. You'll leave behind documentation and decision guidance that make the next customer's journey faster.

Just as important as the technical substance: this is a relationship-building role. Day to day you'll work alongside the customer's platform and infrastructure teams, mostly their senior engineers, leads, and architects. You'll also engage directly with the Directors and VPs of Infrastructure and Platform Engineering who set platform direction, and the goal is to become a trusted advisor on that broader strategy, not just their Portworx footprint. Done well, this role earns Portworx (and Pure) real standing and visibility across the customer's platform organization.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design and review production Portworx architectures for complex, high-stakes environments: bare metal and virtualized on-prem estates, multi-cluster and DR topologies, KubeVirt VM migration, regulated and air-gapped deployments, and hybrid footprints where customers also run cloud or CaaS
• Pressure-test the customer's intended design against the compute, storage fabric, hypervisor, and network they actually have, and tell them plainly where it won't hold
• Advise on the decisions that determine whether a deployment survives contact with production: storage class design, KVDB topology, snapshot and backup policy, replication mode and placement, capacity and sizing
• Guide the customer's infrastructure and platform teams through the layers underneath Portworx: LUN presentation and masking, multipath behavior, LVM layout, HBA and NIC choices, MTU and bonding, VLAN and routing boundaries, hypervisor datastore and passthrough decisions. Their engineers execute; you make sure the design is sound and the tradeoffs are understood
• Where it strengthens the recommendation, validate an architecture pattern in a lab before traveling on-site, so advice rests on something tested rather than assumed
• Define the failure-mode and performance validation plan before go-live (node, rack, and AZ loss, path and fabric failure, network partition, upgrade paths), then interpret the results with the customer
• Act as the senior technical voice during critical rollouts and live escalations: direct the diagnosis, frame the decision, and pull in Support and Engineering when the problem belongs to them
• Author reference architectures, runbooks, and decision frameworks that become reusable IP across engagements
• Upskill customer platform teams so they can operate independently post-handoff
• Build and sustain relationships across the customer's platform organization: daily with the senior engineers, leads, and architects you work beside, and directly with the Directors and VPs of Infrastructure and Platform Engineering, by understanding and helping shape where their platform is headed rather than only where Portworx sits in it
• Conduct periodic visits to established, already-live accounts to maintain the relationship, stay current on their evolving platform needs, and surface expansion opportunities. Many customers start small and grow, and this is how that growth gets found and won
• Develop enough fluency in the customer's development environment and workflows to speak credibly to their platform needs as a whole
• Log and structure field feedback (bugs, feature gaps, roadmap signal) for a recurring feedback loop with Product and Engineering
• Partner closely with Sales Engineering, Customer Success, and Support to triage which engagements warrant FDE involvement
• We are primarily an in-office environment and therefore, you will be expected to work from the Santa Clara, Chicago, or New York office in compliance with Everpure's policies, unless you are on PTO, or work travel, or other approved leave

WHAT YOU BRING

The depth below is what the role runs on. We expect you to have earned it by operating this infrastructure yourself earlier in your career, because customers can tell the difference between someone who has run it and someone who has read about it.

• 5+ years in infrastructure or platform engineering, SRE, architecture, or field and solutions engineering roles; prior "forward deployed," field engineering, or professional services experience a plus
• Must have Unix & Linux administrator experience
• Deep Kubernetes expertise (CKA/CKS or equivalent), grounded in having run clusters in production rather than in a lab
• Strong command of enterprise storage: Fibre Channel SAN (zoning, WWPNs, fabric login and path behavior), iSCSI, NVMe/TCP, NAS protocols, dm-multipath, LVM, and array-side provisioning, masking, and mapping
• Real understanding of compute and server hardware: bare metal provisioning and lifecycle, BIOS, firmware and driver management, HBA and NIC selection, NUMA and CPU/memory topology, local NVMe layout and endurance
• Production-grade virtualization knowledge, ideally VMware vSphere and ESXi (datastores, VMFS, vVols, HA and DRS behavior, resource contention), plus an understanding of KubeVirt as a migration target
• Practical data center networking: VLANs and trunking, MTU and jumbo frames, bonding and LACP, L2 versus L3 boundaries, routing, load balancer integration, and how partitions, congestion, and asymmetric paths present in a distributed storage system
• Solid Linux systems background extending to the block and device layers: udev, kernel and sysctl tuning, systemd, I/O scheduling, and performance triage with tools like iostat, blktrace, and perf
• Familiarity with cloud and managed Kubernetes platforms (EKS, AKS, GKE, OpenShift) is useful, since many customers run a hybrid footprint, but on-prem depth is what this role is built around
• Working understanding of customer development environments (CI/CD, application deployment patterns, dev and test workflows) sufficient to reason about platform needs beyond just the storage layer
• Prior experience with Portworx, other CSI-based storage platforms, or enterprise storage vendors (Pure Storage, NetApp, Dell, etc.) is highly valued
• Genuine relationship-building instincts. Trust is earned with the engineers and leads you work beside and has to extend to the senior leaders above them; this is a relationship you sustain, not a project you close out. Comfort running both a technical whiteboard session and a live war-room call, and staying in touch between fires
• The judgment to know when to advise and when to step back. You'll spend more time shaping decisions and teaching than typing at a customer's keyboard
• Strong technical writing skills. The artifacts you leave behind are as important as the advice you gave in the room.

#LI-ONSITE

The annual base salary hiring range is: 230400 - 281600 USD