Forward Deployed Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: United States

Compensation: $220K – $260K • Offers Equity

Employment Type: FullTime

Help build 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, 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 to help bring that vision into production.

You'll work directly with our customers—especially in the Bay Area—helping them build exciting products with durable execution. You'll also help shape the future of Restate by bringing customer insights back to the team, influencing the product roadmap, and sharing what you're learning with the broader developer community through talks, demos, and other evangelism efforts.

If you enjoy distributed systems, infrastructure, and solving difficult engineering problems alongside other engineers, we'd love to talk.

About Restate

Restate is a lightweight runtime that turns services, workflows, and AI applications into durable processes.

Developers adopt Restate so they can focus on the business logic, thanks to the intuitive and simple to use Restate abstractions, while Restate takes care of all the challenges one needs to solve to build resilient and scalable applications, which traditionally involved developers themselves architect complex Event Driven applications and distributed systems.

Restate itself is built to be a low latency durable execution, built in Rust, ready for production scale thanks to its own optimized storage engine. Developers can build Restate applications using any of the available SDKs, using TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Golang, Python, Rust or Ruby.

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 about building infrastructure developers genuinely enjoy using, with thoughtful engineering and elegant systems.

The Role

You'll own the technical journey from a team's first evaluation to running mission-critical workloads in production.

You’ll work side-by-side with customer engineers to solve hard infrastructure problems, build production applications, design distributed systems, debug Kubernetes deployments, and troubleshoot complex production environments,

As one of our first engineers 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 Do

Help customers build production systems

• Lead technical evaluations and proof-of-concepts

• Design production architectures with customer engineering teams

• Build integrations, reference implementations, and sample applications

• Guide customers from successful evaluation through production deployment

Make production deployments successful

• Design Kubernetes and cloud deployment strategies

• Establish observability, networking, security, and operational best practices

• Troubleshoot production issues

Improve Restate

• Lead developer evangelism through technical talks, conference presentations, meetups, webinars, demos, and tutorials.

• Turn recurring customer questions into reusable tooling and enablement assets

• Partner closely with engineering to improve the developer experience

What We're Looking For

We're looking for exceptional engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems alongside customers.

Must Have:

• Experience with backend Event Driven Applications: why, how they work, what are the challenges.

• Experience in one or more language Restate supports, with the will to learn more: TypeScript, Java, Kotlin, Python, Golang, Rust & Ruby

• Hands-on experience with deploying applications on Cloud providers and/or Kubernetes

Nice to Have:

• Past experience in rewrites/rearchitecting production applications, e.g. converting an event driven application in a workflow engine.

• Experience in production operations, such as observability and troubleshooting

How You Work

• You enjoy partnering directly with engineers to architect software and solve real world problems.

• You communicate technical ideas clearly, from architecture reviews to debugging sessions.

• High ownership and thrive in ambiguous environments.

• You naturally turn one-off solutions into reusable systems, documentation, and tooling.

Why This Role

Most infrastructure companies build Customer Engineering after they've scaled. You'll build it while the category itself is still taking shape.

You'll build it while the category itself is still taking shape.

You'll influence product direction through direct customer feedback, establish how engineering teams adopt Restate, and become one of the technical leaders helping define an entirely new infrastructure category.

The systems you build, the implementation patterns you create, and the relationships you develop with customers will shape how every future deployment succeeds.

If you're excited by the idea of building both software and the function that helps the world adopt it, this is a rare opportunity to do both.

Location

• United States (San Francisco Bay Area Preferred)

• Travel approximately one to two weeks per quarter