Principal Software Engineer

About the Job At Red Hat, we don’t just build software; we build ecosystems. The PartNex team sits at the critical intersection of Red Hat’s internal product engineering and our global partner portfolio. We bridge the gap. Our mission is to ensure that every partner solution from AI and Telco to Cloud and Hardware is not just compatible, but integrated, supported, and optimized. We verify the interoperability of the world’s most critical technology solutions on Red Hat platforms, ensuring they are validated, certified, and ready for the enterprise. When a customer or an end user runs a partner's product on Red Hat, it carries a badge of integrity that PartNex helps define. As a Principal Partner Solutions Engineer - Red Hat Platforms (Principal Software Engineer), you will be central to this effort. You will leverage deep technical expertise to diagnose and resolve complex architectural challenges across a massive partner landscape. This role requires a unique blend of Platform Strategy, Emerging Tech Solutions, and Ecosystem Integrity to ensure our stack spanning RHEL, OpenShift, Red Hat AI, and Ansible, remains the industry standard. When a partner certifies and validates on Red Hat platforms, together we ensure their solutions are consistent, interoperable, and supported so customers can deploy with confidence. What will you do Architectural Troubleshooting: Be accountable and responsible for diagnosing and resolving high-impact technical issues across Red Hat AI, OpenShift, and RHEL, including specialized layers like CSI, CNI, and CNF. Ecosystem Integrity: Drive technical discussions and troubleshoot intricate partner certification submissions to maintain the security and stability of the ecosystem. Next-Gen Tooling & Agentic SDLC: Contribute to the design and enhancement of validation tools, specifically exploring Agentic SDLC workflows to automate and scale ecosystem integrity as well as internal processes to list the partner on the catalog faster. Strategic Stakeholder Management: Act as a technical liaison for key decision-makers at partner organizations, managing escalations and providing concise technical briefs to leadership. Cross-Functional Leadership: Partner internally with Level 2-3 Product Support, various Engineering teams, Tech Sales, Solution Architecture, and Product management teams to bridge the gap between partner needs and product roadmaps. Mentorship: Elevate the team’s technical bar by mentoring junior engineers and fostering a culture of continuous learning. What will you bring Experience: 10 years in Software Engineering, focusing on platform verification, validation, or reliability engineering. Linux & Cloud-Native Mastery: Expert-level proficiency in Linux environments and a deep understanding of Kubernetes and containerization architectures. AI/ML Fluency: Strong use experience of Generative AI, RAG, LLMs, and AI/ML frameworks. Frontline Expertise: Experience working on the frontline with customers or partners on pre-production and production infrastructure or applications. Technical Advocacy: Leading the internal process optimization, ongoing business continuity and efficiency improvements, technical elevation for each engineer, closed loop and feedback integration into regular team connections, and constantly striving to find avenues within various open-source ecosystems to inject the business value and enterprise trust for customers and partners. Modern DevOps: Advanced experience with CI/CD ecosystems (Konflux, Tekton, Jenkins, GitLab) and enterprise issue-tracking via Jira. Analytical Rigor: A proven track record of debugging complex, distributed systems and solving non-trivial technical bottlenecks. Nice to have Advanced proficiency in Python or Golang. Deep background in Virtualization and software-defined storage. Direct experience with a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles. Existing knowledge of Red Hat’s product portfolio and certification workflows. Se ... (truncated, view full listing at source)