Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Backend)

The Opportunity

The Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team tackles some of Postman's most strategic technical challenges. We partner directly with enterprise customers to solve problems that don't fit neatly into existing product boundaries, building production-grade solutions that often become core product capabilities.

As a Sr. Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll operate at the intersection of engineering, product, and customer success. You'll deploy Postman's critical infrastructure into customer environments, solve complex distributed systems challenges, and build the enterprise foundations that enable customers to safely adopt AI at scale.

This isn't consulting or professional services. You're an engineer building production systems alongside customers, turning real-world deployments into durable platform capabilities used by thousands of organizations.  This team will build 0-to-1 products from scratch - innovative, strategic initiatives designed to unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue. 

If you enjoy difficult engineering problems, working directly with customers, and building products from the field, you'll thrive here.  

What You’ll Do

• Build production systems for enterprise customers

  • Customize, deploy, and operate Postman's backend and data-path components within customer environments.
  • Design and build backend services, integrations, and infrastructure that solve high-value customer problems with APIs at the center.
  • Own technical execution from architecture through deployment, production operations, and long-term reliability.

  Engineer for scale and reliability

  • Build highly available, low-latency distributed systems running under real customer workloads.
  • Optimize performance, concurrency, fault tolerance, and observability across heterogeneous infrastructure.
  • Diagnose and resolve complex production issues in environments you don't directly control.

  Enable Applied AI

  • Build the identity, authorization, governance, policy, and observability capabilities that allow enterprises to safely deploy AI agents against their APIs.
  • Help customers move from AI experimentation to production-ready AI systems.

  Partner directly with customers

  • Work alongside strategic customers to deeply understand technical challenges and business priorities.
  • Serve as a trusted technical advisor throughout architecture, deployment, optimization, and adoption.
  • Travel approximately 20–30% to support discovery sessions, architecture workshops, implementations, and production deployments.

  Build products - not projects

  • Rapidly prototype new capabilities, validate customer impact, and iterate quickly.
  • Translate lessons from customer deployments into scalable product improvements alongside Product and Engineering.

About You

You are an experienced backend or distributed systems engineer who enjoys solving difficult technical problems while working directly with customers.

You likely have:

• 6+ years of professional experience building backend services or distributed systems with end-to-end ownership.
• Expertise in Go, Python, Java, Rust, C++, or similar backend technologies.
• Strong experience designing and operating high-throughput, low-latency production systems.
• Deep understanding of concurrency, distributed systems, fault tolerance, performance optimization, and high availability.
• Experience building and deploying cloud-native applications on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Strong Linux systems knowledge and experience debugging complex production environments.
• A track record of leading technical initiatives or serving as a technical lead for significant backend systems.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to collaborate directly with customers and cross-functional teams.
• Comfort operating with ambiguity, taking ownership, and building from first principles in a fast-moving environment.

Nice to Have

We're especially excited if you have experience with:

• Software deployed into customer-managed, self-hosted, or on-premises environments.
• Enterprise identity and authorization technologies such as OAuth2, OpenID Connect (OIDC), SCIM, or policy enforcement systems.
• API gateways, service meshes, or API management platforms.
• Observability platforms and production telemetry across large-scale distributed systems.
• AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), LLM orchestration frameworks, or Applied AI infrastructure.
• Startup, founding engineer, or early-stage product-building experience.
• Customer-facing engineering roles such as Solutions Engineering, Technical Consulting, or Forward Deployed Engineering.

Why You'll Love This Role

• Solve technically challenging distributed systems problems with real customer impact.
• Work directly with some of the world's largest enterprises as they modernize their API and AI infrastructure.
• Influence Postman's product roadmap by transforming customer problems into platform capabilities.
• Help define and build a growing Forward Deployed Engineering organization from the ground up.
• Build the infrastructure that enables enterprises to safely deploy AI at production scale.

The reasonably estimated base salary for this role ranges from $220,000 to $240,000, plus a competitive equity package. Actual compensation is based on the candidate's skills, qualifications, and experience.