Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Backend)

Role details

Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. 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 Customize and deploy Postman's data-path components into customer environments and make them run reliably: deployment, hardening, and the field engineering required to operate on infrastructure we don't control. Engineer for performance, availability, and fault tolerance where it's hardest: live traffic on the critical path, running in environments we don't control. Hold the line on latency and reliability under real customer load. Build the IT controls and enablement that unlock Applied AI for our customers: the identity, policy, governance, and observability that let an enterprise safely run AI agents against their APIs. This is the layer that turns "interesting AI demo" into "AI in production" inside a regulated enterprise. Turn field experience into a product. Take what you learn in real customer deployments and feed it back to core engineering, hardening one-off solutions into durable product capabilities. Set the engineering bar for FDE's data-path work in the field, mentor engineers, and help grow the team as the surface expands. 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: 5+ years of backend or systems engineering experience, with proven end-to-end ownership of large-scale distributed systems. Experience building high-throughput, low-latency backend services, with strong command of concurrency, performance tuning, fault tolerance, and high availability. Expert-level engineering in a backend or systems language such as Go, Python, Java, Rust, or C++, on Linux, with strong debugging skills in complex production codebases. A track record as a technical lead or architect on a significant backend system, setting technical direction and raising the quality bar across a team. Comfort with ownership and ambiguity: able to work autonomously in a small team, make decisions independently, and drive high-stakes projects to completion in the field. A builder's interest in enterprise IT controls and enablement (identity, authorization, policy, governance, observability) as the foundation that lets customers adopt Applied AI safely. Strong communication and a genuine willingness to engage directly with customers and field teams. Nice to Have We're especially excited if you have experience with: Experience with software deployed and operated in customer environments (on-prem, appliance, agent, or self-hosted), including install, upgrade, and remote diagnosis. Familiarity with identity and authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, SCIM), API gateways, or policy enforcement systems. Familiarity with the agentic AI stack: LLM-based agents, MCP, evaluation frameworks, or agent orchestration. Experience building observability into products deployed across many heterogeneous customer environments. 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. What Else? In addition to Postman's pay-on-performance philosophy, and a flexible schedule working with a fun, collaborative team, Postman offers a comprehensive set of benefits, including full medical coverage, flexible PTO, wellness reimbursement, and a monthly lunch stipend. Along with that, our wellness programs will help you stay in the best of your physical and mental health. Our frequent and fascina