Senior Principal Chief Architect Enterprise PlatformDistributed AI Infrastructure & KubernetesPyTorch

About the Job:

The Senior Chief Architect is a high-impact strategic leadership role responsible for directing the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function within our APAC AI Center of Excellence (CoE) in Singapore. Serving as a recognized global authority you will operate at the intersection of business strategy open-source communities and deep software engineering to shape the technical direction of the most significant enterprise and sovereign AI initiatives across the APAC this capacity you will not only guide internal technical strategy but also serve as a prominent public leader advocate and governor within major open-source foundations and regional developer ecosystems.

As the orchestrator of the FDE squad (comprising senior principal and dedicated engineers) you will bridge the gap between our customers unique production needs and our global product and ecosystem engineering hubs. You will act as an executive trusted advisor leading co-innovation engagements with C-level executives in highly regulated sectors (such as Financial Services Public Sector and Utilities) to design resilient future-proof and fully compliant AI platforms.

What you will do

• Engineering-Led Orchestration: Provide technical leadership and operational direction to the Forward Deployed Engineering team. Own the technical qualification process for regional engagements and determine where to invest deep engineering resources.

• Architect Future-Proof Platforms: Drive the end-to-end technical strategy for large-scale hybrid cloud AI deployments. Define architectural patterns that ensure continuous availability high performance and rapid recovery in mission-critical environments.

• Overcome the Integration Wall: Direct the design of complex integration layersincluding custom identity access management legacy data pipelines and network isolation/air-gapped frameworksto move client platforms from initial validation to scaled production.

• Direct Hub Synchronization: Act as the primary technical bridge to global product and ecosystem engineering hubs. Coordinate distributed development efforts to unblock regional AI product gaps align on strategic partner blueprints (e.g. containerized inference runtimes and hardware-optimized configurations) and accelerate next-generation agentic frameworks.

• Upstream Stewardship: Maintain a community-first mindset ensuring that up to 70% of the platform primitives and features built by the FDE squad are successfully contributed back to global upstream open-source communities (e.g. distributed runtimes MLOps platforms and model serving engines).

• Open Source Foundation Leadership: Take active leadership governing board steering committee or working group influence roles in prominent open-source foundations and initiatives (such as LF AI & Data CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) or specialized sovereign AI consortiums) to help shape global standardizations and specifications for cloud-native AI.

• Community Mobilization & meetups: Champion establish and lead major developer and engineering community meetups across the APAC region (e.g. vLLM MLflow Ray and associated Kubernetes-AI groups). Drive regional developer engagement technical workshops and panel sessions to solidify the Singapore CoE as the premier regional hub for open-source AI execution.

• Feedback Loop Optimization: Translate operational edge cases telemetry and adversarial testing data (obtained using automated LLM vulnerability and red-teaming tools) into actionable insights for global product teams to strengthen out-of-the-box platform guardrails.

• Trusted Advisor to Regulated Industries: Partner with C-level executives and government agencies to align AI adoption with complex national regulations data residency mandates and operational resilience policies.

• Compliance-as-Code & Sovereign AI: Architect highly secure localized on-premises AI deployment stacks using Policy-as-Code frameworks to automate regulatory compliance and security governance.

• Platform Maturity Assessments: Lead strategic early-stage customer assessments to map platform maturity and outline multi-year adoption roadmaps that drive long-term business value.

• Harden Software Quality: Establish maintain and monitor rigorous testing and release practices for field-developed platform integrations ensuring they align with enterprise-grade stability and reliability standards.

• SDLC Evolution: Drive the evolution of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for AI workloads introducing modern methodologies continuous integration (CI/CD) and automated benchmarking pipelines.

• Develop Engineering Talent: Coach and mentor senior technical staff principal engineers and local talent within the APAC AI CoE acting as a key sponsor for technical career growth across the region.

The success of the Senior Chief Architect will be measured against:

• Repeatable Perimeter Expansion: Number of field-developed primitives and integrations successfully merged into global product roadmaps and upstream open-source projects.

• Ecosystem Foundation Influence: Successful placement or active leadership contributions in steering committees working groups or advisory boards within relevant open-source foundations (e.g. LF AI & Data CNCF).

• Regional Community Growth: Frequency attendee reach and developer engagement metrics across APAC-hosted open-source AI meetups (vLLM MLflow etc.).

• Strategic Deal Support: Impact on advancing strategic high-value enterprise accounts (>$1M ARR) through architectural intervention and FDE resource deployment.

• Co-Development Milestones: Successful delivery of validated solution patterns blueprints and joint architectures in collaboration with key hardware and cloud partners.

• Cycle Time Acceleration: Reducing time-to-first-value for regional customer implementations (Target: < 90 days from qualified gap to working MVP).

• Thought Leadership Contribution: Publishing high-impact technical architectures

What you will bring

• Mastery of Hybrid Cloud Platforms: Extensive experience architecting and managing Kubernetes-based application platforms across on-premises public cloud and edge environments.

• Software Engineering & Upstream DNA: Deep proficiency in system languages such as Go C/C or Python alongside a proven track record as an active contributor or maintainer in key open-source communities.

• AI/ML Platform Primitives: Expert-level knowledge of distributed inference MLOps/LLMOps pipelines model serving architectures and LLM orchestrators (e.g. LangChain LlamaIndex).

• Advanced Orchestration & Tools: Practical experience with cloud-native operator patterns policy engines and data pipeline frameworks (such as open-source document parsing frameworks e.g. Docling).

• Hardware & Infrastructure Ecosystems: Familiarity with hardware acceleration layers (CUDA ROCm) driver configurations and GPU/NPU operator management.

• Regulated Markets Experience: 12 years of experience in senior technology or architectural leadership roles with at least 5 years specifically serving Financial Services Government or other highly regulated sectors.

• Open Source Ecosystem Advocacy & Governance: 5 years of active participation leadership or working-group management within major open-source foundations. Proven track record of successfully establishing and scaling technical communities or meetups (e.g. vLLM MLflow PyTorch) across multiple APAC markets.

• Strategic Influence: Proven ability to influence C-level stakeholders on major capital and multi-million dollar technology investments.

• Cross-Functional Squad Leadership: Exceptional ability to lead virtual cross-functional squads across Engineering Sales and Consulting without direct authority.

• Policy & Privacy Mindfulness: High level of professional integrity and awareness regarding the handling of sensitive customer data and adherence to local compliance laws.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the worlds leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux cloud container and Kubernetes technologies. Spread across 40 countries our associates work flexibly across work environments from in-office to office-flex to fully remote depending on the requirements of their role. Red Hatters are encouraged to bring their best ideas no matter their title or tenure. Were a leader in open source because of our open and inclusive environment. We hire creative passionate people ready to contribute their ideas help solve complex problems and make an impact.

Inclusion at Red Hat
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