Remote Principal Forward-Deployed Engineer

Ladders; United States; Remote; USD 132,000 - 212,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Discretionary bonuses

Equity grants

Medical, dental, vision plans

401(K) with company matching

Employee stock purchase program

Paid holidays, sick leave, vacation

Job summary

Ladders is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (Principal) to join our team. You bridge deep technical architecture with customer engagement, translating enterprise needs into scalable, cloud-native solutions.

You will collaborate with engineering teams and customer architects to design, validate, and improve production systems, including real-time AI inference and data pipelines, while guiding legacy-to-cloud migrations.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience.
• 5+ years in infrastructure, distributed systems, AI platforms, or Kubernetes at scale.
• Production experience with Go, Python or Java.
• Ability to credibly interact with C-suite stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical authority between engineering teams and enterprise architects.
• Architect and validate production-grade Kubernetes and VMware topologies.
• Design production systems for real-time AI inferencing and data pipelines.
• Lead migration strategies from legacy systems to cloud-native solutions.
• Engineer high-value prototypes and contribute code to core repositories.
• Translate customer pain points into product strategy with management.
• Establish best practices and mentor team members to improve performance.

Skills

Go

Python

Java

Kubernetes

GitOps

Architectural leadership

Tools

Kubernetes

VMware

Git

Job description

Ladders is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (Principal) to join our team. You bridge deep technical architecture with customer engagement, translating enterprise needs into scalable, cloud-native solutions.

You will collaborate with engineering teams and customer architects to design, validate, and improve production systems, including real-time AI inference and data pipelines, while guiding legacy-to-cloud migrations.