Forward Deployed Software Engineer

About Esper
At Esper, we’re on a mission to empower dynamic and responsive policy making in government. We’re building the platform that connects existing data, stakeholders, and public policy goals into a single dynamic system, transforming bureaucracy into infrastructure that encourages innovation and collaboration.

As a fast‑growing Gov Tech company, Esper is at the intersection of two powerful forces: the modernization of government operations and the transformative potential of data‑driven decision‑making. Our customer base is expanding rapidly, and we’re building the team that will define how public policy is shaped for decades to come.

The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) is a rare hybrid: a strong software engineer who is also excited to sit across the table from the customer. You’ll embed directly with government teams to design, build, and ship solutions on Esper’s platform. You’ll be the first FDE hire, defining the role and shaping engagement with Product, Professional Services, and Platform Engineering.

• Lead the technical arc of customer implementations end‑to‑end: discovery, architecture, configuration, integration, testing, deployment, and post‑launch optimization.
• Write production code in Esper’s platform to build features, integrations, and customer‑specific solutions, and contribute upstream when a customer need exposes a general gap.
• Design and build APIs, data pipelines, and integrations with customer systems, including data migration and structured content onboarding.
• Translate customer workflows, complex policy processes, and operational constraints into robust technical architectures.
• Debug across the full stack – application logic, distributed systems, data infrastructure, configuration.
• Be the engineering voice in the room with customers: run architecture reviews, explain design decisions, and push back when a request would create technical debt.
• Carry several customer projects at once and own the systems in production, surfacing architectural and data quality risks before they become escalations.
• Manage scope, dependencies, and milestones across concurrent implementations without dropping the engineering bar on any of them.
• Build reusable tools and systems that compound; each implementation should make the next one faster.
• Work closely with Product and Platform Engineering to feed structured signal from customers into the roadmap and contribute to internal documentation and technical standards.

• 3–6+ years of recent professional experience as a software engineer, solutions engineer, or technical implementation engineer who shipped production code.
• Strong proficiency in one or more programming languages (e.g., Java, Rust, C#, or similar). Expect to be productive in Java 21 + Micronaut within weeks.
• Strong grasp of data structures, algorithms, concurrency, API design, and distributed systems.
• Experience operating a non‑trivial backend service in production: defined its API, owned on‑call, debugged under load, and managed its design decisions.
• Comfortable in any major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure); familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines (Gradle, Git Hub, Circle
  
  CI).
• Hands‑on experience with workflow engines (Temporal, Sidekiq), event stream processing (Kafka, pub/sub), RPC layers (gRPC, Protobuf, REST), and message queuing (SQS, SNS).
• Debugging prowess: chasing a problem from a customer report through application logs, database query plan, network trace, to a fix.
• Direct experience working with customers in a technical capacity, running discovery sessions, and balancing customer needs with platform direction.
• Proven ability to manage multiple work streams with ownership of technical delivery and outcomes.
• Strong written and verbal communication; can explain systems to engineers and state legislators alike.

• Direct experience with Java 21, Micronaut, Kafka, gRPC+Protobuf, Temporal.io, MySQL, JDBI.
• Experience in Gov Tech or working with government systems, regulatory environments, or policy workflows.
• Experience implementing configurable or workflow‑based SaaS platforms.
• Backgro…