Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer LocationUnited StatesEmployment TypeFull timeLocation TypeRemoteDepartmentEngineeringCompensationAnnual Salary $220K – $260K • Offers EquityBuild the next foundational layer of distributed systems infrastructure.Software is changing.Applications are becoming increasingly long-running, stateful, and distributed. As systems grow more autonomous and event-driven, engineers spend more and more time solving the same infrastructure problems: retries, failures, orchestration, state management, and recovery.We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves.At Restate (restate.dev), we're building durable execution as a foundational infrastructure primitive—making reliability a default property of modern applications instead of an engineering burden.We're looking for our first Forward Deployed Engineer, who's interested in working directly with customer engineering leaders, to help bring that vision into production.You'll work directly with engineering teams building some of the world's most sophisticated distributed systems, helping them evaluate, deploy, and operate Restate at scale. Along the way, you'll influence the product, shape our engineering roadmap, and define how technical adoption works as the company grows.If you enjoy distributed systems, infrastructure, and solving difficult engineering problems alongside other engineers, we'd love to talk.About RestateDesigned from first principles, Restate runs as a single Rust binary with its own optimized storage engine, eliminating the need for external workflow databases while delivering low-latency durable execution at production scale.Today, Restate powers production workloads at Fortune 500 companies—including Tier 1 financial institutions—as well as fast-growing infrastructure and AI companies building mission-critical systems.Our team includes the creators of Apache Flink and engineers who built large-scale distributed systems at Meta. We care deeply about elegant systems, thoughtful engineering, and building infrastructure developers genuinely enjoy using.The RoleYou'll own the technical journey from a team's first evaluation to running mission-critical workloads in production.This is an engineering role—not a traditional pre-sales role.You'll spend far more time writing code than creating slides.You'll build production applications, design distributed systems, debug Kubernetes deployments, troubleshoot complex production environments, and work side-by-side with customer engineers to solve hard infrastructure problems.As our first engineer focused on customer adoption, you'll also define how this function scales. You'll establish implementation patterns, create reusable technical assets, and build the feedback loop that continuously improves both customer adoption and the product itself.Your goal is simple: every customer engagement should leave Restate stronger than it was before.What You'll DoHelp customers build production systemsLead technical evaluations and proof-of-conceptsDesign production architectures with customer engineering teamsBuild integrations, reference implementations, and sample applicationsGuide customers from successful evaluation through production deploymentMake production deployments successfulDesign Kubernetes and cloud deployment strategiesEstablish observability, networking, security, and operational best practicesDiagnose and resolve complex production issuesSupport critical customer escalations when they ariseImprove RestateContribute to documentation, tutorials, demos, and implementation guidesTurn recurring customer questions into reusable tooling and enablement assetsPartner closely with engineering to improve the developer experienceWhat We're Looking ForWe're looking for exceptional engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems alongside customers.You don't need to check every box, but you'll likely bring experience in many of these areas.EngineeringBuilding or...