Forward Deployed Engineer

About the role: You’ll join the first cohort of forward deployed engineers, a Member of Technical Staff role that spans applied AI research and production systems, embedded with government partners. There are two teams of roughly equal size. One works with defense and homeland security, with regular on-site days at a secure government facility and a security clearance that is sponsored. The other works with federal health agencies and state and local governments. What you’ll own: Agentic AI systems for high-stakes government missions, from proof of concept to production LLM applications, including multi-agent frameworks, tool-calling agents, RAG pipelines and human-in-the-loop workflows Data curation and evaluation pipelines for model training and iteration Infrastructure for inference, experimentation, evaluation and deployment

What you’ll bring: 1-4 years of production engineering with real shipping ownership Strong Python, and deep hands-on experience with LLMs and agents (RAG, tool calling, multi-agent, context management) Fundamentals first, not a vibe coder, with a track record in data pipelines and ML infrastructure Excellent verbal communication, able to represent the company with partners An ex-founder or founding-engineer mindset: collaborative and low ego Based in the Washington, DC area or willing to relocate quickly, in person five days a week Background that stands out: Ex-founder or founding engineer of a company that grew or exited Forward-deployed or federal work at defense-tech and AI companies Applied engineering at leading AI companies An active security clearance Prior fraud or healthcare-fraud analytics work The details: In the office in Washington, DC, five days a week, full-time. US citizens only. Applicants must be based in the DC area or able to relocate quickly.