Forward Deployed Engineer
Akka (formerly Lightbend)
full-time
Posted on:
Location Type: Remote
Location: New York • United States
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About the role
- Guiding customers to build & release successfully
- Spec-Driven Development: Guide customers through rigorous, specification-first development to ensure AI agents and distributed systems meet strict functional requirements
- Production Readiness: Provide hands-on architectural support for hardening systems, building policy ladders with extensive guardrails, and mitigating deployment risks
- Technical Execution: Assist in environment setup and perform code reviews to ensure applications are production-grade
- Knowledge Transfer: Act as the technical anchor, bridging the gap between initial setup and final deployment with the goal of customer self-sufficiency
- Maintaining customer expertise in post-production
- Strategic Subject Matter Expert: Serve as the consistent expert for complex, customer-specific issues
- Maintain Architectural Context & Growth: Join recurring customer meetings or host weekly "Office Hours" to stay aligned with the system's evolution and identify new opportunities to expand the account
- General Technical Support
- Complex Issue Resolution: Act as the initial point of contact for complex issues that "spill over" from the broader Operational team
- Bidirectional Product Collaboration: Work closely with internal product and engineering teams across all project phases to influence roadmaps based on direct customer insights, while mastering the latest platform innovations to bring specialized, high-value knowledge and assistance to the customer.
Requirements
- Distributed Computing Experience: Proven experience in distributed architecture and functional programming concepts
- Especially having Akka experience, including Clustering, Persistence, and Streams, is highly desirable
- Agentic AI & Logic Systems: Proficient in building logic systems using LLMs through multi-agent interactions
- This includes expertise in context engineering, semantic data, and dynamic orchestration
- AI Safety & Guardrails: Knowledgeable in building policy ladders and implementing extensive guardrails to ensure agentic behavior remains within defined business and safety boundaries
- Experimentation & Evaluation: Preferable background in building AI test suites for rigorous experimentation and evaluation to measure model performance and agent reliability
- JVM Experience: Strong understanding of Java or other JVM-based languages
- Voracious Learner: You are an agent of change, constantly learning and seeking better outcomes for your clients
- Communication & Passion: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with a genuine passion for enabling others to adopt new technologies
- Cloud-Native Expertise: Deep understanding of application deployment and container orchestration, particularly Kubernetes.
Benefits
- A transparent, distributed work environment with a strong focus on work-life balance
- Challenging work that interacts with innovative applications used by millions
- A collaborative culture that attracts the "brightest minds" in the technology community
Applicant Tracking System Keywords
Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.
Hard Skills & Tools
distributed architecturefunctional programmingAkkacontext engineeringsemantic datadynamic orchestrationAI test suitesJavaJVM-based languagesapplication deployment
Soft Skills
communicationpassion for technologyvoracious learnercustomer self-sufficiencycomplex issue resolutionstrategic subject matter experttechnical executionknowledge transfercollaborationguiding customers