Principal Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE) - OnDevice AI

About Sarvam

Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India’s full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India. Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures. Sarvam partners with India’s leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC.

About the Role

This is the most senior individual contributor role in Sarvam’s field engineering function. The Principal FDSE owns the technical relationship with our most strategic enterprise accounts, from architecture and deployment to escalation resolution and long-term platform adoption.

You will work at the intersection of AI-PC hardware (NPU, SLM), enterprise fleet automation, and solution architecture, navigating cross-OEM interoperability challenges and setting the technical direction for how Sarvam’s on-device AI platform deploys and runs at scale in enterprise environments. You will operate with full autonomy on complex engagements and serve as the highest technical escalation point in the field, feeding hard-won platform intelligence directly back to product and engineering.

You will co-own the most ambitious on-device AI problem in India: building sovereign models that run at the silicon level across devices. You will be embedded with silicon partners like Qualcomm, Intel, HP, Apple, and NVIDIA, turning research breakthroughs into production-grade optimisations that serve 1.5 billion Indians at minimum latency. You will architect the GTM, Product, and Forward Deployment Engineering motion from tuning to agentic orchestration and client deployment. This is not a feature team; it is a platform-defining role. If you want to build the infrastructure layer that makes AI truly accessible across every laptop, phone, glasses, and car in India, this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical relationship with Sarvam’s most strategic enterprise accounts, from initial architecture through deployment, adoption, and ongoing platform health
• Lead solution architecture for on-device AI deployments on AI-PC platforms, including NPU offload design, SLM configuration, and cross-OEM hardware compatibility
• Own end-to-end escalation delivery, diagnosing and resolving the most complex platform, firmware, and fleet issues that cannot be resolved at FDSE or Senior FDSE level
• Design and build enterprise fleet automation frameworks using Python and PowerShell, covering provisioning, monitoring, diagnostics, and remediation at scale
• Drive cross-OEM interoperability, working directly with hardware partners to resolve platform-level conflicts and certify deployment configurations
• Define and evolve deployment architecture standards, runbooks, and technical playbooks for the field engineering function
• Act as the primary field-to-product conduit, translating enterprise platform issues and deployment friction into structured product and engineering feedback
• Lead technical presales engagements for strategic accounts, including architecture reviews, POC design, and executive-level technical presentations
• Set the technical bar for the FDSE function and provide senior mentorship to FDSE and Senior FDSE engineers

What We’re Looking For

• Significant experience in field engineering, solution architecture, or enterprise platform deployment, with a track record of owning senior technical relationships
• Deep expertise in enterprise fleet automation: Python and PowerShell scripting at production scale, covering provisioning, diagnostics, and remediation
• Advanced proficiency with Intune, SCCM, and enterprise MDM architecture, including policy design, compliance at scale, and fleet governance
• Strong solution architecture background: able to design, document, and own end-to-end deployment architectures for complex enterprise environments
• Hands-on experience with cross-OEM interoperability, navigating hardware compatibility, driver conflicts, and firmware behaviour across device configurations
• Proven escalation ownership: comfortable holding the highest technical escalation point across a portfolio of strategic enterprise accounts
• Customer-facing authority: experienced presenting technical architecture and roadmap alignment to enterprise IT leadership and C-level stakeholders

Bonus Points

• Direct experience with AI-PC platforms and NPU workloads: Qualcomm Snapdragon X, Intel Core Ultra, AMD Ryzen AI, or equivalent
• Hands-on experience deploying or optimising Small Language Models (SLMs) on-device
• Background in a PC OEM, silicon vendor, or enterprise hardware platform team
• Deep familiarity with enterprise identity, zero-trust architecture, or sovereign cloud deployment requirements
• Experience defining technical escalation frameworks or field engineering processes at an organisational level

Why Sarvam?

Sarvam is a fast-moving, high talent-density team building full-stack AI for India, working on problems that push the frontiers of AI with real population-scale impact.

• Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar
• High ownership and high impact, from day one
• Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems
• You can work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates

If you want to work on problems at the frontier of AI in India, Sarvam is the place to be.