Forward Deployed Engineer/Technical Evangelist (North America)

Akka is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) who has deep technical experience and an enthusiasm for building what's next. You will serve as the primary technical anchor for our customers, providing the expertise needed to build robust, production-grade applications on our agentic platform. This role is a hybrid of a senior consultant and a solution engineer, focusing on enabling customers to successfully design and implement software solutions based on Akka.

• Spec-Driven Development: Guide customers through rigorous, specification-first development to ensure AI agents and distributed systems meet strict functional requirements.
• Production Readiness: Provide hands-on architectural support for hardening systems, building policy ladders with extensive guardrails, and mitigating deployment risks.
• Technical Execution: Assist in environment setup and perform code reviews to ensure applications are production-grade.
• Knowledge Transfer: Act as the technical anchor, bridging the gap between initial setup and final deployment with the goal of customer self-sufficiency.

• Strategic Subject Matter Expert: Serve as the consistent expert for complex, customer-specific issues.
• Maintain Architectural Context & Growth: Join recurring customer meetings or host weekly "Office Hours" to stay aligned with the system's evolution and identify new opportunities to expand the account.

• Complex Issue Resolution: Act as the initial point of contact for complex issues that "spill over" from the broader Operational team.
• Bidirectional Product Collaboration: Work closely with internal product and engineering teams across all project phases to influence roadmaps based on direct customer insights, while mastering the latest platform innovations to bring specialized, high-value knowledge and assistance to the customer.

• Distributed Computing Experience: Proven experience in distributed architecture and functional programming concepts. Especially having Akka experience, including Clustering, Persistence, and Streams, is highly desirable.
• Agentic AI & Logic Systems: Proficient in building logic systems using LLMs through multi-agent interactions. This includes expertise in context engineering, semantic data, and dynamic orchestration.
• AI Safety & Guardrails: Knowledgeable in building policy ladders and implementing extensive guardrails to ensure agentic behavior remains within defined business and safety boundaries.
• Experimentation & Evaluation: Preferable background in building AI test suites for rigorous experimentation and evaluation to measure model performance and agent reliability.
• JVM Experience: Strong understanding of Java or other JVM-based languages
• Voracious Learner: You are an agent of change, constantly learning and seeking better outcomes for your clients.
• Communication & Passion: Excellent written and verbal communication skills with a genuine passion for enabling others to adopt new technologies.
• Cloud-Native Expertise: Deep understanding of application deployment and container orchestration, particularly Kubernetes.

• 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.

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.