Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Backend)

About Us

Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore.

About the Role

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team tackles some of Postman's most strategic technical challenges. We partner directly with enterprise customers to solve problems that don't fit neatly into existing product boundaries, building production-grade solutions that often become core product capabilities.

As a Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer success. You'll deploy Postman's critical infrastructure into customer environments, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and build the enterprise foundations that enable customers to safely adopt AI at scale. This role involves building 0-to-1 products from scratch—innovative, strategic initiatives designed to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue.

Responsibilities

• Customize and deploy Postman's data-path components into customer environments and ensure reliable operation: deployment, hardening, and field engineering on infrastructure we don't control.
• Engineer for performance, availability, and fault tolerance in live traffic on the critical path, running in environments we don't control.
• Build the IT controls and enablement that unlock Applied AI for customers: identity, policy, governance, and observability to safely run AI agents against their APIs.
• Turn field experience into product improvements by feeding real customer deployment insights back to core engineering.
• Set the engineering bar for FDE's data-path work, mentor engineers, and help grow the team as the scope expands.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend or systems engineering experience, with proven end-to-end ownership of large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience building high-throughput, low-latency backend services, with strong command of concurrency, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and high availability.
• Expert-level engineering in a backend or systems language such as Go, Python, Java, Rust, or C++, on Linux, with strong debugging skills in complex production codebases.
• Track record as a technical lead or architect on a significant backend system, setting technical direction and raising the quality bar across a team.
• Comfort with ownership and ambiguity: ability to work autonomously in a small team, make decisions independently, and drive high-stakes projects to completion.
• Interest in enterprise IT controls and enablement (identity, authorization, policy, governance, observability) as the foundation for safe AI adoption.
• Strong communication and willingness to engage directly with customers and field teams.

Nice to Have

• Experience with software deployed and operated in customer environments (on-prem, appliance, agent, or self-hosted), including install, upgrade, and remote diagnosis.
• Familiarity with identity and authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, SCIM), API gateways, or policy enforcement systems.
• Familiarity with the agentic AI stack: LLM-based agents, MCP, evaluation frameworks, or agent orchestration.
• Experience building observability into products deployed across heterogeneous customer environments.

Why You'll Love This Role

• Solve technically challenging distributed systems problems with real customer impact.
• Work directly with some of the world's largest enterprises as they modernize their API and AI infrastructure.
• Influence Postman's product roadmap by transforming customer problems into platform capabilities.
• Help define and build a growing Forward Deployed Engineering organization from the ground up.
• Build the infrastructure that enables enterprises to safely deploy AI at production scale.

Pay

The reasonably estimated base salary for this role ranges from $220,000 to $240,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.

Benefits

• Full medical coverage.
• Flexible PTO.
• Wellness reimbursement.
• Monthly lunch stipend.
• Wellness programs for physical and mental health.
• Frequent team-building events.
• Donation-matching program for causes you care about.

Schedule

This role is in-office 5 days a week for hubs in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Austin, New York City, Tokyo, and London. For Bangalore, employees currently work in the office three days a week and will transition to five days per week by the end of the year.