Forward Deployed Engineer

Redpanda is the first runtime and control plane for agent-data interaction — a unified platform that combines streaming, SQL analytics, and intelligent connectivity with the governance layer enterprise AI agents need in production.

Built on infrastructure already trusted by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups, Redpanda enforces governance entirely outside the agent's data path, controlling what agents see, limiting what they do, and capturing a tamper-proof record of everything they touch, so organizations never have to choose between innovation and control.

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.

Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the delivery arm. We embed engineers directly with strategic customers and build the agents and integrations that turn ADP into owned outcomes. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the builder: embedded on-site, working inside the customer’s environment, writing the code that ships.

This is not a solutions engineering role. You are not here to demo or advise. You are here to build — agents, integrations, data pipelines, and the infrastructure that runs them — alongside a customer team, in their environment, on their timeline.

You Will:  

• Build at the customer site. Write production-quality agents, integrations, and data pipelines on Redpanda ADP, inside the customer’s environment and codebase. What you ship has to work after you leave. 

• 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. Make sure the work integrates correctly with what they already have and what they’ll maintain after you leave.

• 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. Don’t create dependencies on you.

• 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.

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.

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.

How We Work:

• Reports to: Head of FDE 

• Travel: 30–50% during active engagements; lighter between engagements. You’ll be on-site when the build is live.

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.

Join Redpanda if you’d enjoy being part of a fast-moving, diverse, people-first organization with team members around the globe and a culture based on trust, transparency, communication, and kindness. You'll dive into a nimble, high-impact team with the latest AI tools — and the budget to actually use them.