Principal Software Engineer, Agentic Data Plane

Redpanda is pioneering the Agentic Data Plane (ADP) - a new category in AI infrastructure that makes it simple and secure to connect AI agents with enterprise data and systems. Built on a multi-modal data streaming engine, Redpanda empowers agentic applications that reason and act in real-time with speed, autonomy, and precision. Global leaders including Activision Blizzard, Cisco, Moody's, Texas Instruments, Vodafone and 2 of the top 5 banks in the U.S. rely on Redpanda to process hundreds of terabytes of data a day. Backed by premier venture investors Lightspeed, GV and Haystack VC, Redpanda is a diverse, people-first organization with teams distributed around the globe. About the Role: We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to help architect and build Redpanda's Agentic Data Plane (ADP), the control and execution layer that powers how AI agents safely interact with real-world data across the technological sprawl of the modern enterprise. Redpanda’s Agentic Data Plane enables intelligent agents to autonomously access, reason over, and act on enterprise data in real time, while providing their human counterparts with the visibility and control to ensure and validate that they do so securely. It combines Redpanda’s industry-leading low-latency streaming layer, a distributed query engine for real-time context, 300+ connectors for seamless data integration, and a global policy and observability framework that enforces access, records intent, and enables replayable audits. You'll work on identifying and integrating the next generation of ADP capabilities as the agentic AI landscape evolves, translating emerging research and industry shifts into concrete engineering proposals and product bets. You'll partner closely across Engineering, with our Product and GTM teams, as well as directly with strategic customers to shape the product’s architecture and direction. This is a hybrid role based in our San Francisco office. You Will: 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 You Have: 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 te