Staff Engineer - Fabric Gateway
Job Description
Who Are We?
Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman.
P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman.
We are looking for a Staff Engineer to join our Fabric Gateway team. Fabric Gateway is Postman's protocol-agnostic control plane for the agentic world: a single gateway that routes, governs, and observes how AI agents, LLMs, MCP servers, CLIs, and internal APIs discover and interact with each other—deployed in Postman's cloud, the customer's VPC, or a hybrid of both.
This role is ideal for a highly technical engineer who has built high-throughput, low-latency gateways or proxies and wants to define what that layer looks like when the callers are autonomous agents rather than applications and humans. You will shape the architecture of the data plane, control plane, registry, and policy engine, and you will own the hard problems: performance on the hot path, fail-closed security, multi-tenant isolation, and reliability across thousands of upstream providers.
As a Staff Engineer, you will operate as a force multiplier across engineering teams. You will partner closely with Platform, Infrastructure, Security, Product, and AI teams—and directly with enterprise customers—to make Fabric Gateway the trusted way organizations connect agents to their APIs.
What You'll Do
- Drive the technical vision and architecture for Fabric Gateway across its registry, control plane, data plane, and SDKs and connectors.
- Design and build a high-performance, horizontally scalable data plane that routes HTTP, gRPC, MCP, and A2A traffic with minimal added latency.
- Build the policy engine that authenticates, authorizes, classifies, and logs every agent interaction before it happens, with fail-closed behavior when policy cannot be verified.
- Own reliability features on the hot path: fallback chains, circuit breakers, health-aware routing, rate limiting, and weighted traffic distribution across LLM and API providers.
- Design secure credential brokering so upstream secrets are injected by the gateway and never exposed to agents.
- Shape the extensibility model—plugins, policy instances, and connectors—so customers and internal teams can extend the gateway safely.
- Make the gateway operable at enterprise scale across Postman-hosted, self-hosted (Kubernetes or VM), and hybrid deployments, including upgrades, configuration distribution, and multi-region data planes.
- Partner with Observability and Data teams on real-time token metering, cost controls, traces, analytics, and audit-ready logs.
- Investigate complex production and customer issues, identify root causes, and drive long-term corrective actions.
- Mentor senior engineers, lead design reviews, and help raise the technical bar across the organization.
What We're Looking For
- 10+ years of software engineering experience with significant exposure to distributed systems and cloud-native architectures.
- Deep experience building or operating API gateways, reverse proxies, service meshes, or other latency-sensitive networking infrastructure (for example Envoy, NGINX, Kong, Apigee, Istio, or custom proxies).
- Strong understanding of networking and protocols, including HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, gRPC, WebSockets, streaming responses, TLS, and connection management.
- Hands-on expertise in authentication and authorization at scale: OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, mTLS, API keys, secrets management, and fine-grained policy (for example OPA or Cedar).
- Experience designing multi-tenant SaaS systems with strong isolation, and shipping software that customers run in their own environments.
- Strong programming experience in Go, Rust, Java, C++, Node.js, or similar, with a track record of performance profiling and optimization.
- Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Ability to influence technical direction across teams without direct authority.
- Strong communication skills and a data-driven approach to problem-solving.
Preferred Qualifications
- Hands-on experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP), agent-to-agent (A2A) protocols, or LLM provider APIs and their streaming, token, and rate-limit semantics.
- Experience building AI gateways, LLM routers, or agent infrastructure—including token metering, cost controls, prompt or response guardrails, and PII classification.
- Background in building control planes and configuration distribution systems (for example xDS-style APIs) for fleets of data-plane nodes.
- Experience with plugin or extension runtimes such as WebAssembly, Lua, or sandboxed scripting.
- Experience in security-sensitive domains: zero-trust architectures, least-privilege access, audit logging, and compliance programs such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, or HIPAA.
- Contributions to open-source networking, gateway, or AI infrastructure projects.
Why This Role Matters
Fabric Gateway sits at the center of Postman's bet on the agentic world. As enterprises deploy AI agents that act autonomously across their systems, they need infrastructure that governs what those agents can discover, what they can access, and what actions they are authorized to take. Fabric Gateway is that control layer, and it extends Postman's Private API Network and governance into an agent-first interface fabric.
Success in this role means building the gateway that security teams trust, platform teams can run at scale, and agent builders actually want to use. Every request that passes through it depends on the decisions you make about latency, policy, and reliability.
This is a high-impact Staff Engineer position for someone who enjoys solving hard distributed systems and networking problems and wants to define a new category of infrastructure from the ground up.
What Else?
In addition to Postman's pay-on-performance philosophy, and a flexible schedule working with a fun, collaborative team, Postman offers a comprehensive set of benefits, including full medical coverage, flexible PTO, wellness reimbursement, and a monthly lunch stipend. Along with that, our wellness programs will help you stay in the best of your physical and mental health. Our frequent and fascinating team-building events will keep you connected, while our donation-matching program can support the causes you care about. We’re building a long-term company with an inclusive culture where everyone can be the best version of themselves.
At Postman we value in person collaboration. We are in office 5 days a week for all roles based out of our hubs in San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Austin, New York City, Tokyo and London. For roles based in Bangalore, employees currently work in the office three days a week and will transition to five days per week by the end of the year. We were thoughtful in our approach which is based on collaboration and grounded in feedback from our workforce, leadership team, and peers. The benefits of our in office model will be shared knowledge, brainstorming sessions, communication, and building trust in-person that cannot be replicated via zoom.
Our Values
At Postman, we create with the same curiosity that we see in our users. We value transparency and honest communication about not only successes, but also failures. In our work, we focus on specific goals that add up to a larger vision. Our inclusive work culture ensures that everyone is valued equally as important pieces of our final product. We are dedicated to delivering the best products we can.
Equal Opportunity
Postman is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, protected veteran status, or disability status. Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this website or directly to managers. Postman does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Postman will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with Postman.