Forward Deployed Engineer, Federal/National Security

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in technology-led companies across healthcare, cyber, and national security. The Forward Deployed Engineer will work directly with federal and national-security customers to understand mission needs, build and deploy AI-enabled systems, and own delivery from prototype through production in secure and regulated environments.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• 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
• Active U.S. Security Secret Clearance
• U.S. citizenship is required with an active security clearance
• This role may require regular customer-facing work, including virtual and onsite meetings, secure-facility work, or travel depending on program needs (~25%)
• Experience working with federal, defense, intelligence, or other regulated customers
• Active 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
• Washington, DC / Northern Virginia or in another area near a U.S. military concentration preferred