Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role

Redpanda is building the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) — the streaming and data infrastructure the world’s largest enterprises run mission-critical agents on. The enterprises winning right now are building agents that encode their own business logic, their own data, their own institutional knowledge into production-grade infrastructure. That’s digital sovereignty, and Redpanda ADP is the infrastructure layer that makes it real.

Responsibilities

• Write production-quality agents, integrations, and data pipelines on Redpanda ADP, inside the customer’s environment and codebase.
• Work in unfamiliar territory, fast. Every customer engagement is a new codebase, a new data environment, a new set of constraints.
• Ramp quickly, orient to what exists, build on top of it without breaking it.
• Own the technical deliverable. Understand what the engagement is supposed to produce, design the technical approach, build it, and hand it off clean — documented, maintainable, and running in production.
• Be the Redpanda technical voice with the customer’s engineers. Work alongside their team daily. Earn their trust.
• Drive toward exit from day one. Build with handoff in mind. Write documentation that their team can actually use. Train them on what you built.
• Feed learnings back. Identify patterns across engagements — what customers keep needing to build, where ADP makes things hard, what should be productized. Bring that back to Product and Engineering clearly.

Requirements

You have engineering depth. You write production software. You’ve built backend systems, data pipelines, APIs, or agent systems that ran in production and had real consequences when they broke. Language background is flexible; what matters is that you build things that work.

• Agent and integration experience. You’ve built agents, worked with LLM APIs, or built integrations between complex systems. You know what makes an agent reliable vs. brittle, and you’ve made that call in production.
• Ability to operate in any environment. You’ve worked in someone else’s codebase, with constraints you didn’t set, in a stack you didn’t choose. You can read unfamiliar code, understand what it does, and extend it without breaking it.
• Customer-facing communication. You can work directly with a customer’s engineering team — their leads, their architects, their individual contributors — and be a credible, trusted technical partner. You don’t need a PM to translate for you.
• Shipped at a customer site or in a deployment context. You’ve personally been in the room when something hard went live. You know the difference between a demo and a production deployment.

Qualifications

• Bonus Experience in a forward-deployed or customer-embedded engineering model — Anthropic FDE, OpenAI Deployed Engineer, Stripe FDE, Sierra, Palantir FDSE, or analogous.
• Background in streaming or real-time data systems (Kafka, Flink, Redpanda, or similar).
• Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, public sector) or air-gapped environments.
• Have been the first or only technical person in a customer engagement — run it end-to-end without a playbook.

Skills

None listed specifically, but strong technical skills and ability to work in a customer environment are required.

Benefits

Not specified in the job posting.

Pay

$255,000, not including bonus and/or commission.

Schedule

U.S. base salary range for this role is $255,000, not including bonus and/or commission. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. As a remote-first company, we strive to consider each candidate's job-related skills, location, experience, relevant education or training to determine individual base salary. Your talent partner will share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.