Forward Deployed Engineer - Western US

Redpanda; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Redpanda is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer who embeds with strategic customers to build agents, integrations, and data pipelines on Redpanda ADP inside the customer's environment. You’ll work directly with a customer team, writing production-grade infrastructure that runs in their codebase and on their timeline, ensuring the delivered solutions survive post-engagement.

This role is not a traditional solutions engineering position; you are the builder responsible for delivering durable,

Responsibilities

• Build at the customer site by writing production-quality agents, integrations, and data pipelines within the customer's environment and codebase.
• Work in unfamiliar territory, fast—every engagement involves a new codebase and customer setup.

Job description

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 not here to demo or 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,