Forward Deployed Engineer, Federal/National Security

About the Role

We are hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to join a new Stealth National Security incubation within Red Cell. You'll work directly with federal and national-security customers, and your role will sit at the intersection of software engineering, customer delivery, product development, and mission execution.

As an FDE, you will embed with customer teams, understand operational workflows, identify high-value use cases, and build production-ready systems that solve real mission problems. You will move quickly from discovery to prototype to deployment, while maintaining the engineering discipline required for secure and regulated environments.

This is a highly hands-on engineering role. You should be comfortable writing code, debugging systems, working with messy customer environments, translating vague requirements into concrete technical plans, and communicating clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

What You’ll Do

• Work directly with federal and national-security customers to understand mission workflows, pain points, data environments, and operational constraints.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, agents, integrations, and workflow automation in secure customer environments.
• Translate customer needs into technical requirements, implementation plans, and product feedback for the core engineering team.
• Own delivery from prototype through production, including architecture, backend services, APIs, integrations, observability, testing, deployment, and customer acceptance.
• Integrate with customer systems, data sources, identity providers, and cloud or on-prem infrastructure.
• Partner with product, engineering, security, and customer teams to ensure solutions are secure, reliable, auditable, and operationally useful.
• Debug issues in deployed environments and drive fast resolution across application, infrastructure, data, and integration layers.
• Contribute reusable patterns, platform improvements, and documentation back to the broader engineering organization.
• Operate with strong judgment in environments involving sensitive data, government stakeholders, and mission-critical workflows.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to build production-quality systems.
• Experience with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, or applied AI/ML systems.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous customer environments and turn unclear requirements into working software.
• Strong technical communication skills with engineers, product teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Comfort working across the full stack when needed, including backend services, frontend interfaces, infrastructure, integrations, and deployment workflows.
• High ownership, bias for action, and ability to drive outcomes without waiting for perfect requirements.
• Strong debugging instincts and ability to reason across application code, data, infrastructure, networking, and customer systems.
• Interest in national-security missions and willingness to work in secure or restricted environments.
• U.S. Citizen eligible for U.S. Security Secret Clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with federal, defense, intelligence, or other regulated customers.
• Active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance.
• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Mission Engineer, Product Engineer, Platform Engineer, or founding/startup engineer.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM applications, workflow orchestration, evals, guardrails, retrieval systems, or model deployment.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or government cloud environments.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, observability, and secure deployment practices.
• Familiarity with identity and access management, audit logging, data governance, and secure software delivery.
• Experience building in environments with compliance, security, or operational constraints.

Technical Stack

Our stack may include TypeScript, Python, Java, React, FastAPI or similar backend frameworks, Postgres, cloud infrastructure, containerized services, workflow orchestration, observability tooling, and LLM / agentic AI frameworks. We care less about exact tool familiarity and more about strong engineering judgment, adaptability, and ability to ship in complex environments.

Clearance / Eligibility

Because this role supports federal and national-security customers, U.S. citizenship is required with an active security clearance. Candidates without an active clearance may be considered if they are eligible and willing to obtain one.

Location

Washington, DC / Northern Virginia or in another area near a U.S. military concentration preferred. This role may require regular customer-facing work, including virtual and onsite meetings, secure-facility work, or travel depending on program needs (~25%).

Why This Role

This is a chance to build software that directly supports national-security missions. You will work on high-impact problems where AI, automation, and modern engineering can materially improve how mission teams operate. You will not be far removed from the user or buried in a narrow implementation lane; you will be expected to understand the mission, build the system, deploy it, and make it work in the real world.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology, building AI solutions for the future, and are up for a challenge, let’s talk!

Salary Range: $180,000-240,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

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