Forward Deployed Engineer - Western US

Redpanda is the first runtime and control plane for agent-data interaction — a unified platform that combines streaming, SQL analytics, and intelligent connectivity with the governance layer enterprise AI agents need in production. Built on infrastructure already trusted by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing startups, Redpanda enforces governance entirely outside the agent's data path, controlling what agents see, limiting what they do, and capturing a tamper-proof record of everything they touch, so organizations never have to choose between innovation and control. About the Role: Redpanda is building the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) — the streaming and data infrastructure the world’s largest enterprises run mission-critical agents on. 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. That’s digital sovereignty, and Redpanda ADP is the infrastructure layer that makes it real. Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) is the delivery arm. We embed engineers directly with strategic customers and build the agents and integrations that turn ADP into owned outcomes. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you are the builder: embedded on-site, working inside the customer’s environment, writing the code that ships. This is not a solutions engineering role. You are [... source excerpt omitted ...] advise. You are here to build — agents, integrations, data pipelines, and the infrastructure that runs them — alongside a customer team, in their environment, on their timeline. You Will: 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. 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, [... source excerpt omitted ...] e documentation that their team can actually use. Train them on what you built. Don’t create dependencies on you. 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. You Have: Overall Experience. You have 6-10+ years of professional experience in a combination of software engineering and customer facing technical roles. 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