Senior Principal Chief Architect

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 region. In 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. 

Note: This role may come into contact with confidential or sensitive customer information requiring special treatment in accordance with Red Hat policies and applicable privacy laws. 

What you will do? 

1. FDE Squad Orchestration & Technical Strategy 

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 layers—including custom identity access management, legacy data pipelines, and network isolation/air-gapped frameworks—to move client platforms from initial validation to scaled production. 2. Global R&D Bridge & Community Stewardship 

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. 3. Executive Customer Advocacy & Sovereign Governance 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. 4. Technical Quality, Mentorship & SDLC Leadership 

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. 

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

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, whitepapers, or presenting at major global industry forums representing the AI CoE 

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. 

Leadership & Industry Experience 

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.