Forward Deployed Engineer, Networking

About the Role: 

Redpanda is building the Agentic Data Platform (ADP) — the streaming and data infrastructure the world's largest enterprises run mission-critical agents on. Field 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.

This role is the networking specialist on the FDE team. You are the person customers' network, security, and platform teams sit across from when we deploy ADP into their environment. Many enterprise ADP deployments cross a private network boundary — into a VPC, across a hybrid network, behind an identity-aware proxy, integrated with public SaaS surfaces (Teams, Slack, identity providers, model APIs). The topology is never simple. You make it work.

This is not a network engineer staffing a NOC. You are an engineer who can read code, build integrations, and ship — but your specialty is the network topology side of FDE engagements, where many enterprise deployments actually get stuck.

You Will:  

• Own the deployment topology of major enterprise engagements. For each customer, design and lock the network architecture: VPC layout, ingress/egress, private connectivity, DNS, identity-aware proxying, public-SaaS-to-private-VPC bridges. Document it so it survives handoff.
• Translate customer constraints into a workable architecture. Customer networks have ten years of accumulated decisions. SecOps owns egress. Platform owns the VPCs. Identity owns SSO. You meet them where they are, pull the architecture toward something that ships, and avoid breaking their existing posture.
• Herd customer-side teams. Network, security, platform, identity — getting them aligned on a deployment plan is the work. You drive that, with customer-facing communication that earns trust, not friction.
• Build the integrations that bridge the gap.  When the topology demands code — an identity-aware proxy, a private link broker, an egress gateway, a webhook bridge — you write it. Production-quality, documented, deployable by the customer's team after you leave.
• Build alongside world-class Redpanda engineers to help shape ADP itself. You're not just deploying the platform — when the topology problem surfaces a gap in ADP's networking primitives, you work directly with Redpanda's core engineering team to extend the product. The networking patterns you discover in the field become first-class capabilities of ADP. This is engineering work upstream into the platform, not just delivery downstream into customers.
• Be the topology authority across the FDE function. Your FDE peers should be able to pull you in early when they smell a network problem. Build reusable patterns from each engagement so the second customer with the same shape doesn't re-litigate it.
• Feed learnings back. Topology blockers are pattern-rich. Identify the patterns across engagements — what customers keep needing, where ADP's deployment model creates friction, what should be productized (a templated VPC peering setup, a private-link broker, a Teams↔ADP webhook bridge). Bring that back to Product and Engineering clearly.

You Have: 

• Production networking depth. You've designed and operated enterprise cloud networks — VPC architecture in AWS / GCP / Azure, private connectivity (Transit Gateway, PrivateLink, ExpressRoute, Interconnect), hybrid networking, identity-aware proxies, egress controls. You've made architectural calls that held up under load and audit.
• Code that runs in production. You don't outsource the build. When the topology needs glue — an identity-aware proxy, a webhook bridge, a private-link broker, a network-aware deployment tool — you write it. Strong scripting / backend skills (Go, Python, TypeScript) and comfort with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CDK).
• SaaS-to-private-network integration patterns. You've built systems where a public SaaS (Slack, Teams, GitHub, OpenAI APIs, an identity provider) had to talk to something inside a customer's private VPC — and you've done it without compromising the customer's security posture. You know the menu of options (webhooks, reverse tunnels, identity-aware proxies, private endpoints, brokered architectures) and when to use each.
• Customer-facing communication. You can sit across from a customer's principal network engineer, security architect, or VP of Platform Engineering and earn their trust on technical depth — then drive their internal teams toward alignment. You don't need a PM to translate for you.
• Patience for cross-team work. The bottleneck is usually not "what's the right architecture" but "how do I get five customer teams to commit to it by Thursday." You've done that.

Bonus:

• Experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, defense / public sector) where network architecture is also a compliance artifact.
• Experience with air-gapped or BYOC deployments
• Background in zero-trust / identity-aware networking (BeyondCorp / Cloudflare Access / Tailscale / Twingate style).
• Have shipped private-link or hybrid-network products at a vendor (Snowflake, Confluent, Databricks, MongoDB Atlas, Cloudflare, HashiCorp), you understand the vendor side of this problem.
• Experience in a forward-deployed model: Anthropic FDE, OpenAI Deployed, Palantir FDSE, Stripe FDE with a networking-leaning portfolio.

How We Work:

• Reports to: Senior Director, Customer Engineering.
• Travel: Variable. Customer engineering teams will need you in the room when the architecture is being locked, but the topology-focused shape of the role likely runs lighter than the generalist FDE travel profile. Final travel expectation TBD.
• Location: SF, Austin, or NY preferred; remote considered for the right candidate.
• Compensation: see band below.

U.S. base salary range for this role is $255,000, not including bonus and/or commission. 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.

Please note that Redpanda uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to assist in the screening and assessment of applications for this position. However, all final hiring decisions are made by our human hiring team.

Vacancy Status: This job posting is for an existing vacancy.