Principal Software Engineer, AI Platform

Track emerging research, frameworks, and industry developments in the agentic AI space, and translate the most relevant signals into concrete engineering proposals and product bets

Identify, prototype, and deliver high-leverage emerging capabilities for ADP, in partnership with the broader team

Define architectural patterns for new ADP capabilities, ensuring they integrate cleanly with the existing runtime, policy, and observability layers

Engage directly with strategic customers and the field to stress-test new capabilities against real enterprise deployment scenarios

Serve as a technical ambassador for ADP externally, publishing research, writing engineering blog posts, and speaking at conferences to establish Redpanda's credibility at the frontier of agentic infrastructure

Participate in on-call and help drive down operational toil, improving system observability and self-healing capabilities over time

10+ years of software engineering experience, with a demonstrated track record of leading the design and delivery of complex, large-scale distributed systems

Experience building or contributing to emerging areas of agentic AI infrastructure, e.g. eval frameworks, orchestration layers, context management, AI gateways, or similar

Fluency with AI-assisted development at the level of agentic orchestration, i.e. composing multi-agent coding workflows with subagents to dramatically accelerate research and prototyping

Deep expertise in at least one systems language (Go preferred) and comfort working across the stack

Understanding of streaming data systems, messaging infrastructure, or data plane/control plane architectures, experience with Apache Kafka or Redpanda is a plus

Experience designing and operating systems that enforce access control, policy, and auditability at scale

Self-directed, strong written communicator, comfortable collaborating asynchronously in GitHub, Slack, and Google Docs

Excellent interpersonal and communication skills. Able to lead without authority across engineering teams and engage credibly with technical customers and external audiences

Familiarity with AI safety, alignment, or responsible AI research as it applies to autonomous systems in enterprise environments

Experience with protocol buffers, protoreflect and codegen

Background in security, identity, or data governance systems relevant to enterprise environments

Experience running Kafka/Redpanda and/or Postgres at scale

Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native infrastructure across AWS, GCP, or Azure

Prior experience in an early-stage or growth-stage startup, especially in a category-defining product area

U.S. base salary range for this role is $245,000 - $290,000. Our salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location. As a remote-first company, we strive to consider each candidate's job-related skills, location, experience, relevant education or training to determine individual base salary. Your talent partner will share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Join Redpanda if you’d enjoy being part of a fast-moving, diverse, people-first organization with team members around the globe and a culture based on trust, transparency, communication, and kindness. You'll dive into a nimble, high-impact team with the latest AI tools — and the budget to actually use them.