Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE)
The Role
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.
Qualifications & Skills
- 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.
Where You'll Work:
This is a remote position based in North America
What We Offer
- 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.
Our Core Values:
- We're Authentic: We value transparency and genuine communication, without politics or games. We're honest and assume good intentions, cultivating trust and accountability within our organization and in our interactions with others outside of Lightbend.
- We're Customer-Focused: We value customer outcomes above all else. By prioritizing our customers' interests, and meeting them where they are today, we help ensure their success. We are dedicated to deeply understanding our customer's needs, anticipating challenges, navigating time constraints and striving to exceed expectations.
- We're Nonconventional: We value fearless innovation by challenging the status quo and embracing alternative approaches. Continuous learning and a growth mindset aimed at improving ourselves, our company, and our products, drives us to push boundaries and explore new solutions. Guided by a bias for action, we leverage industry and customer insights to inspire fresh ideas, enabling optimal future offerings.
- We're Persistent: We value excellence through continuous experimentation and courageous problem-solving. We recognize that achieving success often demands approaching challenges with tenacity and taking calculated risks to achieve leading-edge solutions.
Equal Opportunity Employer:
Akka is committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace, welcoming individuals from all backgrounds and experiences. We celebrate differences and provide equal opportunities for all employees.
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