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Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (Backend)

San Francisco, California, United States

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 wellness programs will help you stay in the best of your physical and mental health. Our frequent and fascinating team-building events will keep you connected, while our donation-matching program can support the causes you care about. We’re building a long-term company with an inclusive culture where everyone can be the best version of themselves. 

At Postman we value in person collaboration. We are in office 5 days a week for all roles based out of our hubs in San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Austin, New York City, Tokyo and London. For roles based in Bangalore, employees currently work in the office three days a week and will transition to five days per week by the end of the year. We were thoughtful in our approach which is based on collaboration and grounded in feedback from our workforce, leadership team, and peers. The benefits of our in office model will be shared knowledge, brainstorming sessions, communication, and building trust in-person that cannot be replicated via zoom.

Our Values

At Postman, we create with the same curiosity that we see in our users. We value transparency and honest communication about not only successes, but also failures. In our work, we focus on specific goals that add up to a larger vision. Our inclusive work culture ensures that everyone is valued equally as important pieces of our final product. We are dedicated to delivering the best products we can.

Equal opportunity

Postman is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status. Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Postman does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Postman will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Postman.

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