Principal Software Engineer

Redpanda brings identity, policy control, and data governance to AI agents. Redpanda announced the availability of new core capabilities in the Redpanda Agentic Data Plane (ADP), including a centralized AI gateway, AI observability and evaluation via OpenTelemetry, AI agents, and unified authentication and authorization. Together, these features form a unified governance layer that allows enterprises to securely connect AI agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to live enterprise data with visibility and control. As organizations move from AI experimentation to production, the challenge has shifted from building agents to governing them. "This is why the enterprise agentic AI market is struggling while consumer AI flourishes," said Tyler Akidau, CTO of Redpanda. "Building an agent is remarkably easy. Running one safely in a company, with access to sensitive systems and data, remains genuinely hard. Redpanda is focused on bringing control to the connectivity layer - rather than configuring access policies individually at each data source, enterprises need a central point through which all agent interactions flow: an agentic data plane." "AI agents don't fail because models are bad; they fail because systems lack control," said Alex Gallego, founder and CEO of Redpanda. "With Redpanda Agentic Data Plane, we're giving enterprises a practical way to operate agentic systems safely, with identity, policy enforcement, and observability built in from day one." Available Redpanda ADP capabilities. First introduced in October, Redpanda's ADP exists to make AI agents trustworthy at scale. Acting as both a governance layer and a control plane, it governs how agents authenticate, access data, and take action while recording intent, inputs, and outputs for complete auditability. With AI Gateway, open agent interoperability, unified identity, and full observability, enterprises gain the controls needed to safely run agents on live data without sacrificing speed or visibility. "Redpanda addresses the right requirements with this release, as our research shows a strong need for both strong AI governance and real-time data inputs," says Kevin Petrie, VP Research and Head of Data Management Practice of BARC. "AI adopters feel overwhelmed with the complex task of meeting these requirements while safely integrating powerful GenAI models into their business processes. Redpanda's approach will help make data and AI leaders' lives easier." AI Gateway. Redpanda AI Gateway provides a unified access layer between applications, AI models, and MCP services. It centralizes routing, policy enforcement, cost controls, and observability across all AI traffic. Enterprises can define token budgets, set spending limits, and optimize usage through deferred tool loading, bringing operational discipline to complex agent workflows. The AI Gateway also serves as a central point to aggregate and govern MCP servers, with an admin-controlled registry of approved servers and YAML-based configuration for rapid deployment. AI agents. Redpanda ADP is designed to work with any AI agent framework. Enterprises can run and govern agents built on their existing frameworks, as well as use Redpanda's built-in AI agents when they want a fully-managed option. All agents, whether hosted by Redpanda or external, interact with data and tools through open standards like the A2A protocol, and integrate with ADP's unified authentication, authorization, and observability services. Agents can also be triggered through Redpanda Connect pipelines, enabling real-time, event-driven and human-in-the-loop workflows. Unified authentication and authorization. All components of the Redpanda Agentic Data Plane are secured through OIDC-based identity and fine-grained authorization policies. Every request, whether from a user, service account, or agent, is authenticated and governed, eliminating long-lived credentials and reducing the risk of uncontrolled agent access. End-to-end observability and evaluation. Redpanda ADP emits full-fidelity metrics, traces, logs, and transcripts using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP). Enterprises can inspect agent behavior directly in the Redpanda console or export traces to external observability platforms, enabling debugging, compliance, and post-incident analysis. The Redpanda Agentic Data Plane is built on a low-latency streaming foundation, enabling real-time data access, continuous context updates, and event-driven agent execution. With more than 300 connectors available through Redpanda Connect, enterprises can expose data from databases, SaaS platforms, data streams, and data lakes without moving data or breaking existing architectures. More about

Redpanda appoints Jennifer Lawrence as CRO. Redpanda, a San Francisco, CA-based provider of a real-time data platform for the agentic enterprise, appointed Jennifer Lawrence as new Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). In her new role, Lawrence oversees all go-to-market strategy, global revenue operations, and customer engagement initiatives to accelerate Redpanda's continued growth and commercial impact. Lawrence brings more than 20 years of revenue leadership experience, having previously served as CRO at Expel, where she grew new customers by over 600%, scaled out both commercial and enterprise teams, and expanded operations globally. Prior to Expel, she was a Global VP of Sales at Duo Security, which was acquired by Cisco in 2020. At Cisco, Lawrence led security sales and continued to expand Duo's presence from $7M ARR to over $550M ARR and over 30,000 customers. Led by Alex Gallego, founder and CEO, Redpanda provides an AI infrastructure platform that makes it simple and secure to connect AI agents with enterprise data and systems. Built on a multi-modal data streaming engine, a broad connectivity suite, and a high-performance federated SQL query engine, all integrated into an agentic-first governance layer, 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. use Redpanda to process hundreds of terabytes of data a day. Backed by venture capital firms Lightspeed, GV and Haystack VC, Redpanda recently acquired Oxla, a distributed SQL engine, and introduced the Agentic Data Plane (ADP), a new product line built to help enterprises govern and connect their data for the era of AI agents.

Combining streaming, SQL, and Iceberg for cloud to air-gapped environments enables governed data access to safely accelerate the production of enterprise AI agents