Lead Senior Principal Forward Deployed Engineer (10566)

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