Forward Deployed Engineer

Restate (restate.dev) is a lightweight runtime that turns AI agents, workflows, and backend services into durable processes—so teams can focus on their logic, not failure mechanics.

The role: Own the technical path from PoV/PoC enablement → production readiness & deployment for Restate. You’ll work hands-on with customers and the OSS community to make adoption frictionless, ship production-grade implementations, and turn what you learn into reusable enablement assets and product improvements.

Front-row seat to the biggest infra shift in decades

Durable runtimes like Restate are becoming the next foundational infrastructure component - and increasingly a critical piece for AI applications. As systems become more agentic, long-running, integration-heavy, and failure-prone, durable execution turns reliability from a bespoke engineering tax into a default property. In this role, you’re not watching that shift from the sidelines - you help build the platform that enables it.

State-of-the-art tech, built from first principles

Restate re-imagines durable execution as a lightweight self-contained stack - no database required - and ships as a single Rust binary with an optimized custom storage layer, low latency orchestration, and an analytics engine for observability.

Enterprise Traction

Restate is already used by Fortune 500 companies, including Tier 1 banks running critical financial workflows, and also by cutting-edge AI and infra startups pushing the boundary of what “production-grade agents” mean. You’ll work on problems where reliability, correctness, and operational simplicity are existential.

Work with world-class engineers

You’ll partner directly with engineers who’ve built and operated foundational systems at scale - creators of Apache Flink, and leaders from Meta’s messaging infrastructure. You’ll have the chance to work with incredibly talented individuals who care deeply about their craft.

Public impact and developer-brand upside

This is an outward-facing role with real surface area. You’ll help customers and the open-source community succeed. If you care about building a publicly visible developer brand, this role naturally creates that platform.

Founding forward deployed engineer: you shape the function

You’re joining as a founding forward deployed engineer, meaning you define how this works: the PoC playbook, the path-to-production patterns, the reusable assets, and the feedback loop into product. If you want ownership, leverage, and the ability to build something that scales beyond you—this is that seat.

This is a Forward Deployed Engineering role that spans the full technical adoption lifecycle, with a clear center of gravity in PoC → production readiness → deployment.

• PoV/PoC enablement (hands-on): Work directly with customer engineers and OSS evaluators to make PoCs successful—integrations, reference implementations, architecture guidance, and “known-good” patterns.

• Production readiness & deployment: Drive the work required to go from “PoC works” to “production-ready”: Kubernetes, cloud setup, observability, networking/security integration, operational patterns, and rollout planning.

• Technical close support (lightweight, early): Support discovery workshops and POV planning to ensure evaluations are correctly scoped and set up for success.

• Post-sale escalation / on-call: Participate in escalation and on-call rotations for customer-critical issues, focused on unblocking adoption and production reliability.

• Create and maintain tutorials, demos, and reusable enablement assets.

• Feed friction/papercuts into engineering—and contribute directly to docs, examples, SDKs, and (when appropriate) the core product.

• You’ll work closely with engineering and founders on active customer/OSS projects.

• You’ll increasingly partner with AEs in later-stage projects as the GTM motion scales.

We’re targeting Senior: strong fundamentals, high ownership, fast learning, and genuine excitement for customer-facing engineering.

• Languages: fully proficient in Go or Rust, plus at least one of TypeScript, Java, Python.

• Infrastructure: strong Kubernetes skills, strong observability instincts, and hands-on experience with at least one cloud stack (AWS, GCP, or Azure).

• Distributed backend architecture: practical experience designing/operating real systems and understanding failure modes and reliability patterns.

• Customer-success mindset: you go beyond the immediate issue—understand context, adjacent use cases, and help activate internal champions.

• Experience with auxiliary infrastructure components: API gateways, proxies, ingress/service-mesh patterns, auth layers.

• Strong enablement writing: turning repeated problems into crisp guides and reusable assets.

• Deep experience navigating enterprise procurement/compliance constraints—you can learn that on the job.

• You want to work primarily on the runtime core rather than customer/field problems.

• You lack hands-on experience deploying and operating systems in real environments.

• US-based, with a preference for the East Coast.

• Travel: typically 1–2 weeks per quarter (customer onsite + occasional team time).