Forward Deployed Engineer - US Remote

Redpanda Data

3d • $157,500 - $185,000 • Remote

About The Position

Redpanda is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to build agents, integrations, data pipelines, and infrastructure on its Agentic Data Plane (ADP) for strategic enterprise customers. The engineer embeds with customer teams and writes production code directly in their environments and codebases. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a solutions engineering role focused on demonstrations or advice.

The engineer owns technical deliverables from understanding the desired outcome through design, implementation, production deployment, documentation, and handoff. They work in unfamiliar codebases and data environments, integrate with existing systems, and help customer teams maintain what has been built. They also share recurring customer needs and product feedback with Redpanda’s Product and Engineering teams.

The position is US remote, with on-site work during active customer engagements. Travel is expected to be 30–50% during active engagements and lighter between engagements. The role reports to the Director, Customer Engineering. The US base salary range is $157,500–$185,000, excluding bonus and/or commission.

Requirements

• 6–10+ years of professional experience combining software engineering and customer-facing technical roles.
• Experience writing production software, such as backend systems, data pipelines, APIs, or agent systems.
• Experience building agents, working with LLM APIs, or integrating complex systems.
• Ability to assess agent reliability and brittleness based on production experience.
• Experience working in other organizations’ codebases and with unfamiliar stacks and constraints, and extending systems without breaking them.
• Ability to communicate directly and credibly with customer engineering teams, including technical leads, architects, and individual contributors.
• Personal experience being present when a challenging system or solution went live in a customer-site or deployment context.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in a forward-deployed or customer-embedded engineering model, such as Anthropic FDE, OpenAI Deployed Engineer, Stripe FDE, Sierra, Palantir FDSE, or an analogous role.
• Background in streaming or real-time data systems such as Kafka, Flink, or Redpanda.
• Experience in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, or the public sector, or in air-gapped environments.
• Experience serving as the first or only technical person in a customer engagement and running it end-to-end without a playbook.

Responsibilities

• Build production-quality agents, integrations, and data pipelines on Redpanda ADP within customer environments and codebases.
• Ramp up quickly in unfamiliar codebases, data environments, technology stacks, and constraints, and extend existing systems without breaking them.
• Own technical deliverables by understanding engagement outcomes, designing the technical approach, building it, and handing it off in a documented, maintainable, production-ready state.
• Work directly with customer engineers and ensure solutions integrate with existing systems and can be maintained by the customer.
• Plan for handoff from the beginning, document the work, train customer teams, and avoid creating dependencies on the engineer.
• Identify patterns across engagements and communicate customer needs, product challenges, and productization opportunities to Redpanda Product and Engineering.
• Travel to customer sites during active engagements as needed.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed