Forward Deployed Engineer - Security Clearance Eligible

The role: the technical operator who makes the product work in the field for the customers who depend on it most. Embedded with federal and national security customers, sitting at the seam between business development and engineering. The customer’s technical advocate inside the company, and the company’s technical advocate inside the customer’s building. Small, high-trust team writing its own playbook.

The work:

Own technical delivery into federal and national security environments, from first prototype through operational acceptance and sustainment

Embed with customer teams worldwide to learn the workflows, threat models, and constraints that never make it into a requirements document

Configure, integrate, and tune mobile core capabilities against each mission profile

Run pilots, exercises, and demos structured to produce decision-quality evidence, not theater

Provide live technical support during operations and incidents; run root-cause analysis and push preventive fixes into the platform

Write production-grade code for the glue, integrations, tooling, and one-off capabilities that unblock deployments

Prototype features in the field, validate against real mission use, and hand successful patterns to core engineering

Translate mission requirements into prioritized engineering asks, and engineering constraints back into operator language

Partner with BD and solutions architects to convert pilots into programs of record

2+ years in a software engineering or forward-deployed engineering role

Swiss-army-knife technical range: code, debug networking, reason about systems-level tradeoffs, learn fast

Strong at scoping ambiguous problems and sequencing delivery without explicit instruction

Sharp written and verbal communication, equally fluent briefing a flag officer, writing an engineering ticket, and running a customer working session

High ownership and resourcefulness, including the unglamorous parts

U.S. citizenship and eligibility for a U.S. Top Secret clearance (active TS strongly preferred)

Willingness to travel up to 50% to customer sites, military installations, and partner locations

Nice to have:

Active TS/SCI

Prior military service, government civilian experience, or time in comms, signals, cyber, or intelligence roles

Customer-facing technical background at a defense tech startup

Mobile networks, telecom, networking infrastructure, or cybersecurity depth

Early engineer or operator experience at a sub-100-person company

Track record of taking field-driven feature work into a core roadmap

Compensation: $180k to $230k for Arlington, VA, or New York, NY, depending on experience and interview performance, plus meaningful equity.