Missionforce - Senior/Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Public Sector
$149k - $365k • Virginia - Herndon
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
Virginia - Herndon
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) on our Public Sector team, you will be embedded with U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Aerospace clients. Your role will involve designing and deploying bespoke AI solutions to drive mission-critical outcomes and architecting the backbone of a planet-scale platform that ships hundreds of features daily with rock-solid reliability and security. This position demands a builder's mindset, an AI-first approach, and the technical depth to take complex challenges from concept to production.
Responsibilities
- Serve as the technical lead on customer engagements, designing, building, and deploying tailored Salesforce solutions for defense, intelligence, and aerospace missions.
- Engineer distributed systems running across thousands of compute nodes on major cloud platforms.
- Develop Infrastructure-as-Code, microservices, and data pipelines.
- Build and ship production-grade software using modern engineering practices, integrating AI into the development workflow.
- Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows.
- Contribute to building and maintaining a shared system context for AI operations.
- Critically evaluate code for correctness, quality, security, and performance.
- Partner directly with customers to translate complex needs into technical solutions.
- Lead rapid prototyping, root cause analysis, and best-practice evangelism.
- Mentor junior engineers and serve as a technical role model.
Requirements
- 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience.
- Deep proficiency in Java, GoLang, Python, or Ruby.
- Demonstrated AI-first approach to engineering, using AI to enhance development speed and contribution.
- Experience using AI tools in development workflows (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor).
- Advanced prompt engineering skills for reliable and production-ready AI outputs.
- Experience with enterprise data platforms (e.g., Salesforce Data Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery).
- Experience working in an air-gapped GovCloud environment.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills.
- Ability to travel 25–50% of the time.
- Active Secret or Top Secret clearance required.
- Must be a U.S. citizen (U.S. born or naturalized) without dual citizenship.
- Ability to meet customer and government screening standards.
Benefits
- AI agents accelerate your impact.
- Support for work-life balance.