[Hiring] Senior Product Engineer @Redpanda Data

Role Description

In-band defenses for AI agents — a system prompt telling a model to behave, or an LLM reviewing its own tool calls — share the same failure mode: they trust the thing they're supposed to be constraining. The out-of-band policy engine is Redpanda's answer to that problem, and one of the fundamental thrusts of how we think about the product:

• A policy proxy that sits at the tool boundary and enforces outside the model entirely.
• The agent's prompt and tool surface stay byte-identical; the proxy decides whether a call is authorized, needs its response masked or filtered, requires a scope-narrowing rewrite, or has to be deferred into a human-approval step.
• In our own adversarial benchmarking, this approach held its defense in 99.8% of attempts.

The policy language is ratified and a working prototype exists — nine authorable operators spanning:

• Authorization
• Data exposure
• Semantic gating

What's ahead is turning that prototype into production infrastructure:

• Wiring it into our AI gateway as the real enforcement path.
• Building out the authoring experience so policies are something a security team can write and test with confidence.
• Landing every decision as an audited, replayable record.

We're looking for a Senior Product Engineer to help build that — this is a high-ownership, deeply technical role at the center of how Redpanda makes agentic AI safe enough for security teams to say yes to.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in software development, including building systems that enforce authorization or policy decisions in a live request path.
• Experience with policy-as-code systems such as Cedar, Open Policy Agent (Rego), XACML, or comparable authorization frameworks.
• A solid understanding of AI agent and LLM system failure modes.
• Comfortable with the mindset of adversarial testing.
• Comfortable working with a globally distributed engineering team.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills and demonstrated technical ownership.

Requirements

• Take the out-of-band policy engine from benchmarked prototype to production.
• Build out the two-tier policy composition model.
• Extend the set of authorable policy operators across authorization, data exposure, and semantic gating.
• Land every enforcement decision as an audited, attributable record.
• Maintain and extend the adversarial certification harness.
• Work directly with design-partner customers in security-conscious industries.
• Bring up difficult and/or systemic challenges to the attention of your manager.
• Actively discuss strategic topics with peers to help shape the product's roadmap.
• Track progress, assess risks, and actively communicate contingency and mitigation plans.

Benefits

• U.S. base salary range for this role is $205,000 - $230,000.
• Salary ranges are determined by role, level, and location.
• Consideration of each candidate's job-related skills, location, experience, relevant education or training.

Company Description

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.