8+ years in customer-facing escalation, field, or site reliability engineering at a networking or security vendor.
Experience deploying and supporting products in customer environments across private cloud, public cloud, and virtualized platforms.
Hands-on experience with production container platforms: Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD (GitLab, Jenkins).
Infrastructure as code and automation with Terraform, Python, and Bash.
Strong Linux troubleshooting across host, network stack, and application layers.
Multi-cloud and virtualization depth: GCP, AWS, Azure, OCI, plus VMware ESXi/vSphere, KVM, and Hyper-V.
Working networking and security knowledge: IP routing basics, VPC design, VPN, firewalls, security groups, TLS, WAF.
Responsibilities
Work directly with customer platform and operations teams through deployment, bring-up, cutover, and upgrades.
Drive customer escalations to a verified fix with engineering and switching specialists, isolating issues across various layers.
Integrate Upscale systems with customer cloud, automation, observability, and security tooling.
Scope and deliver Professional Services engagements: deployment, integration, automation, health checks, performance validation, and upgrades.
Plan and run User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with customers, including test plans and execution.
Design and build customer-representative lab topologies for issue reproduction and proofs of concept.
Build runbooks from case feedback and proactive work, turning them into automation and training data.
Benefits
On-call rotation with a small global team.
Travel opportunities to customer sites.
Full Job Description
Role Scope and Impact:
We are hiring a Forward-Deployed Engineer focused on lab, runbook automation, and Professional Services work. You will deploy, validate, and stabilize customer AI fabric environments at customer sites and from our office. You will build the lab environments that reproduce and resolve field issues, write the runbooks that drive our AI monitoring agent, and deliver Professional Services engagements from scoping through handoff. You will work closely with engineering, product, and sales, and build fabric-level triage skills alongside our switching specialists.
This role delivers results in five areas:
Forward-deployed engineering. Hands-on work with customers through deployment, bring-up, and escalations, shortening the time to a stable production fabric.
Professional Services. Scoped, repeatable services, including deployment, integration, health checks, upgrades, and User Acceptance Testing (UAT), delivered to a consistent standard as a core team function.
Lab validation. Customer-representative lab environments for issue reproduction, fix validation, UAT dry runs, and proofs of concept.
Runbooks and automation. Runbooks built from case feedback and proactive work that drive the automation in our AI monitoring agent.
Enablement. Technical guidance and documentation for field and sales teams.
Responsibilities:
Forward-Deployed Engineering
Work directly with customer platform and operations teams through deployment, bring-up, cutover, and upgrades.
Drive customer escalations to a verified fix with engineering and our switching specialists. Isolate issues across host, Linux, container, virtualization, cloud, and security layers, and separate fabric problems from host and workload problems.
Integrate Upscale systems with customer cloud, automation, observability, and security tooling.
Report repeat field issues and product recommendations to product and engineering.
Professional Services:
Scope and deliver Professional Services engagements: deployment, integration, automation, health checks, performance validation, and upgrades.
Plan and run User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with customers: test plans, execution, issue tracking, and sign-off.
Produce engagement deliverables: design and deployment documents, runbooks, and as-built documentation.
Build out the team's Professional Services practice with team and sales leadership: service offerings, delivery standards, templates, and playbooks.
Run knowledge transfer and training for customer teams at handoff.
Lab:
Design and build customer-representative lab topologies for issue reproduction, fix validation, and proofs of concept.
Run pre-deployment validation and UAT dry runs before customer sign-off.
Automate test setup, test runs, and data capture with Python, Bash, and Terraform.
Reproduce and qualify issues before they reach development.
Define lab environment requirements and coordinate them with IT.
Runbooks and Automation:
Build runbooks from case feedback and proactive work, and turn them into automation and training data for our AI monitoring agent with the agent's lead developer.
Build Prometheus and Grafana dashboards and alerts that tie switch, host, and NIC telemetry together.
Read source code (Python, Go, C) and NOS-side scripts to confirm root cause.
Enablement:
Serve as a technical resource for field engineers, sales engineers, and other customer-facing teams.
Support pre-sales technical discussions and proofs of concept.
Requirements:
8+ years in customer-facing escalation, field, or site reliability engineering at a networking or security vendor.
Experience deploying and supporting products in customer environments across private cloud, public cloud, and virtualized platforms.
Hands-on experience with production container platforms: Kubernetes, Docker, and CI/CD (GitLab, Jenkins).
Infrastructure as code and automation with Terraform, Python, and Bash. Comfortable using AI coding assistants to move faster.
Strong Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS) troubleshooting across host, network stack, and application layers.
Multi-cloud and virtualization depth: GCP, AWS, Azure, OCI, plus VMware ESXi/vSphere, KVM, and Hyper-V.
Working networking and security knowledge: IP routing basics, VPC design, VPN, firewalls, security groups, TLS, WAF.
Monitoring and observability with Prometheus and Grafana, including alerting for high-availability services.
Tier 2 or escalation experience driving customer incidents to resolution across SRE, engineering, and product.
Strong customer-facing communication, including technical documentation such as deployment guides, runbooks, and test plans.
Follow-through: you stay with an issue until root cause is confirmed and the fix is verified.
Nice to have:
Professional Services delivery experience, including scoping, statements of work, and customer acceptance.
Pre-sales, proof-of-concept, or customer UAT experience.
Data center switching: Ethernet, BGP, QoS (PFC, ECN), and optics.
SONiC, RoCEv2, NCCL, or GPU cluster networking.
Experience with AI or ML tooling, or building datasets for ML classification.
NVIDIA networking hardware (Spectrum, ConnectX, BlueField) or Ultra Ethernet.
Traffic generation and test tools such as Keysight/Ixia.
Penetration testing and security hardening (for example, Qualys).
Experience leading small teams or technical workstreams.
What This Role Is Not:
Not a ticket-queue role. You write the runbooks and turn them into automation.
Not an IT or systems administration role. Lab work is driven by customer deployments, validation, and issue reproduction.
Not a dedicated switching specialist role. Deep fabric debugging is done jointly with our switching specialists.
Not a full-time development role. Your output is successful deployments, resolved issues, PS deliverables, runbooks and automation, and product recommendations.
The role includes an on-call rotation, a small global team, and travel to customer sites.
$180,000 - $285,000 a year
Where you fall within that range depends on your experience, skills, and impact-we benchmark against internal levels to keep things fair and consistent.
