Forward Deployed Engineer

Department:
Customer Operations

Location:
Remote, USA

Description
Akka is seeking a
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
who perfectly balances sharp technical capability with elite, client-facing communication. This is an interactive, high-impact role. You are not a "behind the scenes" developer, nor are you a high-level consultant who just talks strategy. You are an adaptable, sharp engineer who can command a room of enterprise developers, understand their architectures, and teach them how to build production-grade applications on our agentic platform.

Your success is measured by the customer's technical self-sufficiency and the ultimate stability of their push to production. You are a fast-twitch learner who can rapidly master new tech stacks, confidently unblock engineering hurdles alongside customer teams, and mentor them to success.

Key Responsibilities
1. High-Touch Client Enablement & Technical Training

• Educational Leadership:
  Design and deliver highly engaging technical workshops, architectural deep-dives, and hands-on training sessions to customer development teams, taking them from zero to proficient on the Akka tech stack.
• Technical Mentorship & Pairing:
  Act as a core technical anchor. Enable customer developers through architectural guidance, pairing on complex production logic, and building "spikes" (proofs of concept) that the customer then owns and scales.
• Rapid Adaptability:
  Quickly grasp unfamiliar customer architectures, business domains, and codebases, providing immediate, collaborative technical direction and troubleshooting.

2. Guiding Production Success (AI & Systems Engineering)

• Agentic Strategy:
  Guide customers in architecting logic systems using multi-agent LLM interactions, focusing on context engineering, semantic data, and dynamic orchestration.
• System Hardening:
  Provide the technical expertise needed for customers to harden their own environments, helping them build policy ladders with extensive guardrails and mitigated deployment risks.
• Deployment Excellence:
  Ensure customer applications are resilient, production-ready, and scalable. You provide the tools, SRE best practices, and systems knowledge required for a safe, repeatable path to production.
• SRE & DevOps Guidance:
  Advise on environment setup and container orchestration to ensure backend stability and reliability once live.

3. Strategic Partnership

• Customer Voice:
  Serve as a bidirectional bridge between the customer and Akka's internal Product and Engineering teams to influence the roadmap based on real-world engineering friction points.
• Ongoing Growth:
  Host interactive "Office Hours" and recurring architectural reviews to help the customer's system safely evolve.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Agentic AI & Logic Systems Expertise:
  Deep, hands-on proficiency in constructing complex logic systems using LLMs and multi-agent frameworks. You must be highly skilled in context engineering, managing semantic data, designing dynamic orchestration flows, and implementing multi-agent interactions.
• AI Safety, Guardrails, & Evaluation:
  Strong background in building enterprise-grade policy ladders and implementing robust guardrails to ensure agentic behavior remains predictable and safe. Experience building AI test suites for continuous evaluation and model performance measurement is highly desired.
• Elite Communication & Client Polish:
  You must possess
  native-level English verbal and written fluency
  . You can confidently lead technical presentations, command a room of enterprise engineers, and translate complex concepts into clear, structured discussions.
• Hyper-Fast Technical Adaptability:
  A voracious learner who thrives in ambiguity. You have a proven track record of picking up new languages, frameworks, and cutting-edge AI paradigms in days, not weeks, and can confidently write code and build prototypes within them.
• The "Teacher" Mindset:
  A background in technical enablement, developer relations, technical consulting, or engineering mentorship. You genuinely enjoy teaching, public speaking, and pairing with other developers to solve problems.
• Distributed Computing Foundation:
  Solid experience in distributed architecture and functional programming concepts. Specific hands-on experience with
  Akka (Clustering, Persistence, and Streams)
  is highly desirable.
• JVM Proficiency:
  Strong professional understanding of
  Java
  or other JVM-based languages.
• Cloud-Native & SRE Awareness:
  Understanding of application deployment and container orchestration, particularly
  Kubernetes
  , to help customers achieve a safe, repeatable path to production. Experience operating within or migrating workloads to VeloceDB framework environments is heavily prioritized.

Benefits

• Competitive salary with performance-based incentives.
• Comprehensive health and wellness benefits.
• Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning.
• Flexible remote working environment.
• Collaborative, inclusive, and innovative company culture.
• 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.