Senior Product Engineer, Out-of-Band Policy Engine, AI Platform

Redpanda Data

11d•$205,000 - $230,000

About The Position

Redpanda is seeking a Senior Product Engineer to build and productionize its Out-of-Band Policy Engine for AI agents. This role is central to Redpanda's mission of making agentic AI safe for enterprise use by providing a policy proxy that enforces governance outside the agent's data path. The engine controls agent actions, filters responses, and records all interactions, offering a more robust security solution than in-band defenses. The current focus is on transforming a working prototype into production infrastructure, integrating it with the AI gateway, enhancing the authoring experience for security teams, and ensuring all decisions are auditable and replayable.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in software development, including building systems that enforce authorization or policy decisions in a live request path (a proxy, gateway, or middleware layer, not just a batch or offline check).
Experience with policy-as-code systems such as Cedar, Open Policy Agent (Rego), XACML, or comparable authorization frameworks.
A solid understanding of AI agent and LLM system failure modes — prompt injection, tool misuse, data exfiltration through model output — and why defenses that live inside the model's own reasoning loop are fundamentally weaker than defenses that don't.
Comfortable with the mindset of adversarial testing: designing for attackers who are actively trying to defeat what you build, not just for well-behaved input.
Comfortable working with a globally distributed engineering team, collaborating on GitHub, in the open, and a self starter.
Strong verbal and written communication skills and demonstrated technical ownership.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with Cedar (AWS's policy language) specifically, or deep experience with a comparable policy-as-code language.
Experience building or operating a proxy or gateway that sits in a security-critical request path in production (API gateway, service mesh sidecar, egress/ingress proxy, or similar).
Experience designing or running red-team / adversarial evaluation harnesses, including working with an LLM-as-judge evaluation setup.
Experience with LLM guardrail, content-safety, or prompt-injection defense systems, especially having seen their failure modes firsthand.
Experience with audit/compliance logging pipelines, especially ones that need to hold up as evidence for external security or regulatory review.

Responsibilities

Take the out-of-band policy engine from benchmarked prototype to production: wiring the Cedar-based enforcement proxy into our AI gateway as the real guardrail path for governed tool calls.
Build out the two-tier policy composition model — a per-tool-server data-owner ceiling composed with per-agent narrowing, most-restrictive wins — and the authoring experience that lets a security or compliance team write, test, and validate policies with confidence.
Extend the set of authorable policy operators across authorization, data exposure, and semantic gating, including the deferred-approval state that routes a call into human review rather than allowing or blocking it outright.
Land every enforcement decision as an audited, attributable record — the kind of durable evidence a customer's security team can actually review after the fact.
Maintain and extend the adversarial certification harness (multi-turn red-team adversary, blinded judge, deterministic leak metrics) so enforcement claims stay backed by evidence as the system evolves.
Work directly with design-partner customers in security-conscious industries to understand what a real security review actually demands of a policy engine, and feed that back into what you build.
Bring up difficult and/or systemic challenges and impediments to the attention of your manager.
Actively discuss strategic topics with peers to help shape the product's roadmap and how the team works.
Track progress, assess risks, and actively communicate contingency and mitigation plans for the systems you own.