Forward Deployed Engineer, Federal/National Security
- Work model
- Remote
- Location
- Remote (USA)
- Posted
- 15d ago
typescriptpythonjavareactfastapipostgresawsgcpazurekubernetesdockerterraform
<div class="content-intro"><h3>About Us</h3> <p>Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.</p></div><h3>About the Role</h3> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <h3>What You’ll Do</h3> <ul> <li>Work directly with federal and national-security customers to understand mission workflows, pain points, data environments, and operational constraints.</li> <li>Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, agents, integrations, and workflow automation in secure customer environments.</li> <li>Translate customer needs into technical requirements, implementation plans, and product feedback for the core engineering team.</li> <li>Own delivery from prototype through production, including architecture, backend services, APIs, integrations, observability, testing, deployment, and customer acceptance.</li> <li>Integrate with customer systems, data sources, identity providers, and cloud or on-prem infrastructure.</li> <li>Partner with product, engineering, security, and customer teams to ensure solutions are secure, reliable, auditable, and operationally useful.</li> <li>Debug issues in deployed environments and drive fast resolution across application, infrastructure, data, and integration layers.</li> <li>Contribute reusable patterns, platform improvements, and documentation back to the broader engineering organization.</li> <li>Operate with strong judgment in environments involving sensitive data, government stakeholders, and mission-critical workflows.</li> </ul> <h3>What We’re Looking For</h3> <ul> <li>Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to build production-quality systems.</li> <li>Experience with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, or applied AI/ML systems.</li> <li>Ability to operate in ambiguous customer environments and turn unclear requirements into working software.</li> <li>Strong technical communication skills with engineers, product teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.</li> <li>Comfort working across the full stack when needed, including backend services, frontend interfaces, infrastructure, integrations, and deployment workflows.</li> <li>High ownership, bias for action, and ability to drive outcomes without waiting for perfect requirements.</li> <li>Strong debugging instincts and ability to reason across application code, data, infrastructure, networking, and customer systems.</li> <li>Interest in national-security missions and willingness to work in secure or restricted environments.</li> <li>Active U.S. Security Secret Clearance.</li> </ul> <h3>Preferred Qualifications</h3> <ul> <li>Experience working with federal, defense, intelligence, or other regulated customers.</li> <li>Active Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance.</li> <li>Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Mission Engineer, Product Engineer, Platform Engineer, or founding/startup engineer.</li> <li>Experience with AI agents, LLM applications, workflow orchestration, evals, guardrails, retrieval systems, or model deployment.</li> <li>Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, or government cloud environments.</li> <li>Experience with Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, observability, and secure deployment practices.</li> <li>Familiarity with identity and access management, audit logging, data governance, and secure software delivery.</li> <li>Experience building in environments with compliance, security, or operational constraints.</li> </ul> <h3>Technical Stack</h3> <p>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.</p> <h3>Clearance</h3> <p>Because this role supports federal and national-security customers, U.S. citizenship is required with an active security clearance.</p> <h3>Location</h3> <p>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%).</p> <h3>Why This Role</h3> <p>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