Forward Deployed Engineer for AI & Distributed Systems

Lightbend; United States; Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Transparent work environment

Focus on work-life balance

Collaborative culture

Job summary

Lightbend is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to serve as a technical anchor for customers, providing expertise in building production-grade applications using Akka. This hybrid role combines consulting and solution engineering. Responsibilities include guiding customers through specification-driven development, providing architectural support, and maintaining expertise post-production. Ideal candidates should possess strong skills in distributed computing, AI systems, and JVM languages. The position offers a collaborative work culture and a focus on work-life balance.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in distributed architecture and functional programming concepts, particularly with Akka.
• Expertise in context engineering, semantic data, and dynamic orchestration for agentic AI systems.
• Knowledge of policy ladders to ensure agentic behavior remains within defined boundaries.
• Experience in building AI test suites for rigorous evaluation.
• Strong understanding of Java or JVM-based languages.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Deep understanding of application deployment and container orchestration, especially Kubernetes.

Responsibilities

• Guide customers through specification-driven development to meet functional requirements.
• Provide architectural support for system hardening and mitigate deployment risks.
• Assist with environment setup and code reviews for production-grade applications.
• Act as the technical anchor for the customer, ensuring self-sufficiency.
• Serve as a subject matter expert for complex issues.
• Maintain alignment with customer needs and identify growth opportunities.

Skills

Distributed Computing Experience

Agentic AI & Logic Systems

AI Safety & Guardrails

Experimentation & Evaluation

JVM Experience

Voracious Learner

Communication & Passion

Cloud-Native Expertise

Proficiency in languages other than English

Job description

Lightbend is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to serve as a technical anchor for customers, providing expertise in building production-grade applications using Akka. This hybrid role combines consulting and solution engineering. Responsibilities include guiding customers through specification-driven development, providing architectural support, and maintaining expertise post-production. Ideal candidates should possess strong skills in distributed computing, AI systems, and JVM languages. The position offers a collaborative work culture and a focus on work-life balance.