AI Forward Deployed Engineer

Job Summary

We are hiring our client's first cohort of Forward Deployed Engineers, split roughly 50/50 between two teams. The role is a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) position spanning applied AI research and production systems, with direct partner-facing responsibilities to ensure operational success inside US Government partner environments.

Two teams under the same role framing:

• Team 1 — Black-Box / Top-Secret Team: works on non-civilian agencies (Department of War, Homeland Security). US citizens only, non-negotiable. Engineers on this team will work on-site at the Pentagon 2-3 times per week and will be sponsored for TS clearance. Existing TS clearance is a strong plus and a real acceleration
• Team 2 — Civilian Agency Team: works with CMS, HHS, state and local governments. US citizens preferred but not required (O-1 candidates are on the table).

The mandate:

• Architect and ship agentic AI systems for high-stakes US Government missions, from proof-of-concept through production
• Design and integrate LLM-based applications — multi-agent frameworks, tool-calling agents, RAG pipelines, human-in-the-loop autonomy workflows
• Embed directly with government partners in operational environments
• Build and scale data curation and evaluation pipelines for model training and iteration
• Develop and maintain infrastructure supporting model inference, experimentation, evaluation, and deployment on frontier AI platforms
• Turn mission-relevant data, models, and tooling into real operational autonomy capabilities
• Own the full system lifecycle — discovery, architecture, deployment, security, reliability, continuous improvement

Engineers are expected to be proficient at expressing technical ideas clearly to non-technical government stakeholders, and to represent Client's at a high caliber

Requirements

• 1-4 years of production engineering experience
• Strong Python engineering background with demonstrated end-to-end delivery
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and building agentic systems — RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, multi-agent frameworks, context management, agentic engineering
• Real deep technical knowledge, not vibe-coding
• Track record designing or managing data pipelines and ML infrastructure
• Excellent verbal communicator
• In-person 5 days/week at DC office
• US citizen for the top-secret team (non-negotiable); US citizen preferred for the civilian team, O-1 candidates on the table for exceptional profiles
• Available to start ASAP

Pay: $150,000.00 - $250,000.00 per year

Benefits:

• 401(k)
• 401(k) matching
• Employee discount
• Health insurance
• Relocation assistance
• Vision insurance

Application Question(s):

• Will you be able to reliably commute or relocate to Washington, DC for this job?

Experience:

• Backend development: 2 years (Required)

Security clearance:

• Confidential (Preferred)

Ability to Commute:

• Washington, DC 20580 (Preferred)

Work Location: In person