Founding Product Engineer, Customer

Build the next foundational layer of distributed systems infrastructure. Software is changing. Applications are becoming increasingly long-running, stateful, and distributed. As systems grow more autonomous and event-driven, engineers spend more and more time solving the same infrastructure problems: retries, failures, orchestration, state management, and recovery. We don't think every engineering team should have to build those capabilities themselves. At Restate ( restate.dev ), we're building durable execution as a foundational infrastructure primitive—making reliability a default property of modern applications instead of an engineering burden. We're looking for our first Founding Product Engineer to help bring that vision into production. You'll work directly with engineering teams building some of the world's most sophisticated distributed systems, helping them evaluate, deploy, and operate Restate at scale. Along the way, you'll influence the product, shape our engineering roadmap, and define how technical adoption works as the company grows. If you enjoy distributed systems, infrastructure, and solving difficult engineering problems alongside other engineers, we'd love to talk. About Restate Designed from first principles, Restate runs as a single Rust binary with its own optimized storage engine, eliminating the need for external workflow databases while delivering low-latency durable execution at production scale. Today, Restate powers production workloads at Fortune 500 companies —including Tier 1 financial institutions—as well as fast-growing infrastructure and AI companies building mission-critical systems. Our team includes the creators of Apache Flink and engineers who built large-scale distributed systems at Meta. We care deeply about elegant systems, thoughtful engineering, and building infrastructure developers genuinely enjoy using. The Role You'll own the technical journey from a team's first evaluation to running mission-critical workloads in production. This is an engineering role—not a traditional pre-sales role. You'll spend far more time writing code than creating slides. You'll build production applications, design distributed systems, debug Kubernetes deployments, troubleshoot complex production environments, and work side-by-side with customer engineers to solve hard infrastructure problems. As our first engineer focused on customer adoption, you'll also define how this function scales. You'll establish implementation patterns, create reusable technical assets, and build the feedback loop that continuously improves both customer adoption and the product itself. Your goal is simple: every customer engagement should leave Restate stronger than it was before. What You'll Do Help customers build production systems Lead technical evaluations and proof-of-concepts Design production architectures with customer engineering teams Build integrations, reference implementations, and sample applications Guide customers from successful evaluation through production deployment Make production deployments successful Design Kubernetes and cloud deployment strategies Establish observability, networking, security, and operational best practices Diagnose and resolve complex production issues Support critical customer escalations when they arise Improve Restate Contribute to documentation, tutorials, demos, and implementation guides Turn recurring customer questions into reusable tooling and enablement assets Partner closely with engineering to improve the developer experience What We're Looking For We're looking for exceptional engineers who enjoy solving difficult technical problems alongside customers. You don't need to check every box, but you'll likely bring experience in many of these areas. Engineering Building or operating distributed systems Professional experience with Go or Rust Experience with TypeScript, Java, or Python Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) Production operations, observability, and networking Modern backend architecture and distributed systems design How You Work You enjoy partnering directly with engineers to solve complex production problems. You communicate technical ideas clearly, from architecture reviews to debugging sessions. High ownership and thrive in ambiguous environments. You naturally turn one-off solutions into reusable systems, documentation, and tooling. You care deeply about developer experience, operational excellence, and elegant engineering. Why This Role Most infrastructure companies build Customer Engineering after they've scaled. You'll build it while the category itself is still taking shape. You'll build it while the category itself is still taking shape. You'll influence product direction through direct customer feedback, establish how engineering teams adopt Restate, and become one of the technical leaders helping define an entirely new infrastructure category. The systems you build, the implementation patterns you create, and the relationships you develop with customers will shape how every future deployment succeeds. If you're excited by the idea of building both software and the function that helps the world adopt it, this is a rare opportunity to do both. Location United States (San Francisco Bay Area Preferred) Travel approximately one to two weeks per quarter