Forward Deployed Engineer

Akka (formerly Lightbend)

Forward Deployed Engineer at Akka responsible for technical training and mentorship of customer development teams. Focusing on production stability and enterprise-level application architecture.

Posted 6/2/2026full-timeRemote • 🇩🇪 GermanyMid-LevelSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AkkaJavaKubernetes

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Serve as the primary technical anchor for our customers, providing the expertise needed to build robust, production-grade applications on our agentic platform.
Guide customers through rigorous, specification-first development to ensure AI agents and distributed systems meet strict functional requirements.
Provide hands-on architectural support for hardening systems, building policy ladders with extensive guardrails, and mitigating deployment risks.
Assist in environment setup and perform code reviews to ensure applications are production-grade.
Act as the technical anchor, bridging the gap between initial setup and final deployment with the goal of customer self-sufficiency.
Serve as the consistent expert for complex, customer-specific issues.
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.
Act as the initial point of contact for complex issues that "spill over" from the broader Operational team.
Work closely with internal product and engineering teams across all project phases to influence roadmaps based on direct customer insights.

Requirements

What you’ll need

Proven experience in distributed architecture and functional programming concepts.
Especially having Akka experience, including Clustering, Persistence, and Streams, is highly desirable.
Proficient in building logic systems using LLMs through multi-agent interactions.
This includes expertise in context engineering, semantic data, and dynamic orchestration.
Knowledgeable in building policy ladders and implementing extensive guardrails to ensure agentic behavior remains within defined business and safety boundaries.
Preferable background in building AI test suites for rigorous experimentation and evaluation to measure model performance and agent reliability.
Strong understanding of Java or other JVM-based languages.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills with a genuine passion for enabling others to adopt new technologies.
Deep understanding of application deployment and container orchestration, particularly Kubernetes.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

distributed architecturefunctional programmingAkkaClusteringPersistenceStreamsLLMscontext engineeringsemantic datadynamic orchestration

Soft Skills

written communicationverbal communicationcustomer engagementproblem-solvingcollaboration