Redpanda Data

Forward Deployed Engineer

US - Remote

Sponsorship not specified$217k-$255kDetected 19 hours ago

SQLKafkaData EngineeringLLMsAgentic AIEmbedded Systems5G/LTECommunication

About the role

That's digital sovereignty, and Redpanda ADP is the infrastructure layer that makes it real.
Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the delivery arm.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the builder: embedded on-site, working inside the customer's environment, writing the code that ships.

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.
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.
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.
Build at the customer site.

You know what makes an agent reliable vs. brittle, and you've made that call in production.
Ability to operate in any environment.
You can read unfamiliar code, understand what it does, and extend it without breaking it.
You know the difference between a demo and a production deployment.
You are not here to demo or advise.

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).
Have been the first or only technical person in a customer engagement - run it end-to-end without a playbook.

U.S. base salary range for this role is $$216,800 to 255,000, not including bonus and/or commission.

Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, public sector) or air-gapped environments.
U.S. base salary range for this role is $$216,800 to 255,000, not including bonus and/or commission.
What you ship has to work after you leave.
Make sure the work integrates correctly with what they already have and what they'll maintain after you leave.
Language background is flexible; what matters is that you build things that work.

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.
We embed engineers directly with strategic customers and build the agents and integrations that turn ADP into owned outcomes.
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.
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.

This listing is sourced directly from Redpanda Data's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.