Forward Deployed Software Engineer

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you’ll build the pipelines, data models, and applications that turn a customer’s messy, disconnected data into something a decision-maker can actually use. You’ll work inside two-week sprint cycles, embedded alongside senior engineers and the government stakeholders who depend on what you build.

The best way to describe what we’re after: did you ever build something a non-technical person used to make a real decision? Not a report. Not a slide. A working tool that a manager, a commander, or a director relied on as part of their regular workflow, where getting it wrong would have had real consequences? If you can point to something like that and explain exactly who used it and what they decided, you already think the way this role requires.

Responsibilities

• Provide embedded engineering support, working directly with operational users and senior engineers to deliver capabilities that matter to the mission
• Build and maintain data pipelines, define metrics, and align data transformations to a shared ontology so information means the same thing across the platform
• Develop workflows, applications, dashboards, and AI-enabled features under the guidance of senior engineers
• Help translate stakeholder requests into well-scoped engineering work
• Support production hardening: CI/CD configuration, build scripts, automated tests, and environment promotion
• Resolve defects, ship incremental improvements, and keep deployed capabilities stable
• Write clear documentation: configuration notes, runbooks, and sprint artifacts
• Take part in sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, and demos for government stakeholders
• Test and validate that workflows, dashboards, and features actually work, and that the data lines up with agreed definitions
• Flag integration issues early and work with senior engineers to resolve them

What We’re Looking For: Candidate must have an at least an active Secret Security Clearance or greater, * Hands-on experience with Palantir Foundry, including pipeline building, the Workshop/Slate application layer, and ontology work

• 3+ years of software engineering experience
• Python, TypeScript, or Java experience in cloud-based data platforms
• Experience in government, defense, or classified environments
• Comfort working in a small, fast-moving technical team

You should also be comfortable starting when the requirements are incomplete, which they usually are, and be able to describe a time you traced a problem back through a pipeline or dataset to find where it actually broke.

Pulled from the full job description

• Tuition reimbursement
• Health insurance
• Vision insurance
• Dental insurance
• Unlimited paid time off
• Flexible schedule, We care more about how you think than what tools you’ve already used. People who do well in this role tend to have a specific instinct: when they look at messy data, spread across disconnected systems, they ask what the real underlying things are and how they relate to each other, before they ever think about charts or dashboards. That instinct shows up in a lot of different backgrounds, and most of ours don’t look like a typical software resume.
• You’re a strong fit if you’ve done work like this, in any of these settings or something adjacent to them:
• Practical data engineering: you’ve built and maintained production pipelines and delivered outputs that a real, non-technical user depended on
• BI development where you designed the data model, not just the dashboard on top of it
• Cyber, SIGINT, GEOINT, or all-source intelligence work where you built detection logic, collection tools, or your own data schemas, not just consumed finished reports
• Data science work where you shaped and cleaned raw data yourself before modeling it
• Operations research or systems analysis where you pulled and structured your own raw data to brief decision-makers, * Dental insurance
• Flexible schedule
• Health insurance
• Tuition reimbursement
• Unlimited paid time off
• Vision insurance

We’re a small, veteran-founded government digital services firm. We help federal agencies unlock the value of their own data and get more out of the technology they’ve already invested in. We work in small, senior teams, not large staffing pools, and every person on a program is expected to own real outcomes, not just tickets.