Forward Deployed Engineer - Cambridge, United Kingdom
$115,000 - $135,000 USD yearly
Originally posted 12 October 2026 by the employer.
About the role
As a Forward Deployed Engineer embedded with a strategic customer, you will work hands-on inside their AI data center environment deploying software, solving operational issues, and translating field insights into product features.
What you'll do
- Serve as the technical owner for a customer's production deployment, covering GPU/XPU clusters, high-speed fabrics, schedulers, and orchestration layers. - Lead integration, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and root-cause analysis for production issues. - Write and test code in Python and Bash to prototype fixes, integrations, and tooling in the field. - Guide the customer through software upgrades, cluster expansion, and new feature rollouts while building tailored runbooks and automation. - Translate customer problems into technical requirements and collaborate with the engineering team to design and deliver new product features. - Contribute technical work to RFPs, RFIs, technical evaluations, and proof-of-concept deployments for prospective customers.
What you'll need
- 5+ years in a hands-on infrastructure engineering role (forward deployed engineer, SRE, platform engineer, solutions architect, or similar) with direct customer or internal-customer exposure. - Experience deploying and operating GPU/XPU clusters with high-speed interconnects (InfiniBand/RoCE/Ethernet/NVLink), job scheduling, and training/inference workloads. - Hands-on experience with AI infrastructure software such as Kubernetes, Slurm, Tinkerbell, Canonical MaaS, observability stacks, or infrastructure management platforms. - Scripting and tooling proficiency in Python and Bash, alongside deep proficiency with Linux, containers, and APIs. - Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Nice to have
- Experience as a forward deployed or embedded engineer dedicated to a single large customer. - Experience taking early-stage or pre-launch products into hyperscale, neocloud, or AI lab environments. - Familiarity with inference serving and performance optimization, such as KV-cache behavior, disaggregated serving, and GPU utilization analysis. - Background with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) and data pipelines for infrastructure analytics. - Prior experience at an AI infrastructure software vendor, GPU cloud provider, networking vendor, or hyperscaler.
Skills: AI data center environment, GPU/XPU clusters, high-speed fabrics, Kubernetes, Slurm, Python, Bash
This role has been open 14 days — well below the 54-day median for Infrastructure/Platform Software roles.
Infrastructure/Platform Software · Infrastructure Platform
|
Open roles in category
1009
|
Median days open
54 d
|
Median salary
$223k
|
See the full market breakdown ▾Category comparison, skills in demand, and who else is hiring
| Metric | Delos Data | All employers we track in this specialty (1009 roles · 91 employers) |
|---|---|---|
| Open roles in this specialty | 5 | 1009 |
| Open roles in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family | 6 | 6292 · 146 employers |
| Median days open | 57 d | 54 d (+3 d vs this employer) |
| Median salary (USD postings) | — | $223k |
Skills observed across this category: AI data center environment, GPU/XPU clusters, high-speed fabrics, Kubernetes, Slurm, Python
Who's hiring in this category
- NVIDIA · 282 open roles · median 53 d
- Qualcomm · 65 open roles · median 54 d
- AMD · 57 open roles · median 28 d
- Intel Corporation · 49 open roles · median 13 d
- Graphcore · 48 open roles · median 102 d
- Cerebras · 35 open roles · median 92 d
How we counted: 1009 open Infrastructure/Platform Software (Infrastructure Platform) roles from 91 employers tracked in the SemiconductorJobs index, counted 27 Oct 2026. Specialty figures count only roles carrying this exact specialty label, so an employer's related work in neighbouring specialties is not included there — it is counted in the wider Software, Firmware & Systems family row. Figures refresh nightly.