Postman
Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Backend)
San Francisco, California, United States · Senior
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odds of building a lasting career here
Sponsors, but it's cap-subject — you still face the weighted lottery (~61% per draw at Level IV). Good if you win; have a cap-exempt backup on your list.
Lottery odds assume a STEM candidate.
Personalize to your clock →H-1B wage level
the lottery is wage-weighted — each level is one more entry
$1,187 more — $221,187 — moves this role to Level IV and 4 lottery entries. That figure is inside the range the employer already advertised.
Based on the DOL prevailing wage for this occupation and worksite, a base salary of $221,187 would place this position at wage Level IV. That figure is within the posted range, and I'd like to target it. This role classifies under "Software Developers" for prevailing-wage purposes.
DOL prevailing wage, 2026-27 wage year · Software Developers (15-1252) · San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA. Wage level is derived by USCIS from the offered wage, occupation and worksite; the occupation shown is inferred from the job title.
Employer immigration record
from this employer's Department of Labor filings
Files H-1B transfers
Sourced from Department of Labor LCA, PERM and prevailing-wage disclosure data. Employer matching is by name, so figures may be split across an employer's legal entities. Absence of a filing means none appears in our copy of the data, not that none exists.
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About the role
- The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team tackles some of Postman's most strategic technical challenges.
- Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer success.
- This isn't consulting or professional services.
Responsibilities
- Experience building high-throughput, low-latency backend services, with strong command of concurrency, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and high availability.
- A 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: able to work autonomously in a small team, make decisions independently, and drive high-stakes projects to completion in the field.
- Experience building observability into products deployed across many heterogeneous customer environments.
- 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.
Requirements
- Customize and deploy Postman's data-path components into customer environments and make them run reliably: deployment, hardening, and the field engineering required to operate on infrastructure we don't control.
Nice to have
- We're especially excited if you have experience with:
- 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.
- 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.
- Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.
Skills
- 5+ years of backend or systems engineering experience, with proven end-to-end ownership of large-scale distributed systems.
Compensation
- The reasonably estimated base salary for this role ranges from $220,000 to $240,000, plus a competitive equity package.
Company info
- The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded.
- About You You are an experienced backend or distributed systems engineer who enjoys solving difficult technical problems while working directly with customers.
- At Postman we value in person collaboration.
- 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.
- You're an engineer building production systems alongside customers, turning real-world deployments into durable platform capabilities used by thousands of organizations.
- If you enjoy difficult engineering problems, working directly with customers, and building products from the field, you'll thrive here.
- Build the IT controls and enablement that unlock Applied AI for our customers: the identity, policy, governance, and observability that let an enterprise safely run AI agents against their APIs.
- A builder's interest in enterprise IT controls and enablement (identity, authorization, policy, governance, observability) as the foundation that lets customers adopt Applied AI safely.
Equal opportunity
- Postman is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.
- Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status.
- Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers.
- Postman does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes.
This listing is sourced directly from Postman's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.