Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Backend)

About this role

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:

• 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. 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 well

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