Forward Deployed Engineer at Lockheed Martin

About Forward Deployed Engineering at Lockheed Martin

The Senior Forward‑Deployed Engineer (FDE) works as a hands‑on technical specialist for Lockheed Martin’s AI Factory platform – the internal AI/ML‑Ops foundation that backs our users’ MLOps, GenAI, and agentic workflows. In this role you will partner with senior staff and end users to translate solution concepts into working deployments, implement and tune Kubernetes‑based pipelines, and platform‑level improvement opportunities. * Own assigned customer deployment workstreams end to end, from technical discovery and solution shaping through implementation, rollout, and handoff to sustained use. * Translate customer and user requirements into deployable AI Factory solutions spanning MLOps pipelines, GenAI backends, data\-processing workflows, and agentic applications. * Design, deploy, configure, and maintain Kubernetes\-based MLOps pipelines across AWS, Azure, GCP, and on\-prem GPU\-backed environments, including training, inference, and data\-processing workflows. * Adapt platform architecture and integration plans to

Companies like Lockheed Martin typically structure FDE teams around a build-team model, where engineers join an existing customer engineering function and deploy the product across a portfolio of accounts. Based on FDE Pulse data across 124 active postings, 6% of FDE roles are build-team positions and 1% are "first hire" situations where the engineer defines the function. Lockheed Martin's 2 active postings fall into the first hire category based on role count.

FDE roles across the market are 3% North America-focused based on 124 active postings. 1% of FDE roles are classified as growth hires, meaning the company is expanding its customer base rather than backfilling an existing position. This context matters for FDE candidates evaluating Lockheed Martin: growth hire roles often come with more pressure to ramp quickly but also clearer performance metrics tied to customer success.

What FDEs Do at Lockheed Martin

Forward Deployed Engineers at Lockheed Martin own the technical success of customer deployments. This means designing integration architectures specific to each customer's infrastructure, writing and maintaining production code that runs in customer environments, and serving as the primary technical point of contact for enterprise accounts. The role sits at the intersection of product engineering and customer success without being either.

Day-to-day work for an FDE at Lockheed Martin varies by customer complexity and deployment stage. In the early phases of a new customer engagement, FDEs focus on environment setup, data mapping, and building the first integrations. As deployments mature, the work shifts toward performance tuning, expanding use cases, and training customer teams on new capabilities. Some FDE roles also feed product insights back to internal engineering, effectively acting as a bridge between customer needs and the roadmap.

Career Path for FDEs at Lockheed Martin

FDE careers typically progress along one of three paths: deepening technical specialization within the FDE function (moving from mid-level to senior to staff FDE), transitioning into engineering management (leading FDE teams or broader customer engineering organizations), or lateral moves into product management (where customer-facing FDE experience is highly valued). All three paths are available at companies with established FDE programs.

The FDE market median of $180,000 base salary across 134 active postings reflects a market that prices the role at a premium over equivalent-seniority software engineers at the same companies. Total compensation including equity, particularly at venture-backed companies, can be 20 to 50 percent higher than base salary. FDEs considering opportunities at Lockheed Martin should evaluate total compensation, not just base salary, when comparing offers.

Interview processes for FDE roles at most companies include a technical coding round, a system design round specific to customer deployment scenarios, and a customer scenario exercise where candidates are asked to scope a deployment, communicate trade-offs, and handle technical objections. Strong candidates combine engineering depth with the ability to explain complex systems to non-technical stakeholders clearly and without jargon.

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