Redpanda Data - Forward Deployed Engineer
Requirements
• 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. • Engineering depth. • 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. • Ability to operate in any environment. • 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. • Customer-facing communication. • 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. • Shipped at a customer site or in a deployment context. • 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 • Reports to: • Travel: 30–50% during active engagements; lighter between engagements. You’ll be on-site when the build is live. • Travel: • Canadian Salary base range is 244,540 CAD- 287,694 CAD. 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.
Responsibilities
• 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. • Build at the customer site. • 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. • Work in unfamiliar territory, fast. • 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. • Own the technical deliverable. • 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. • Be the Redpanda technical voice with the customer’s engineers. • 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. • Drive toward exit from day one. • 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. • Feed learnings back.
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