Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Federal/National Security

Red Cell Partners • McLean, VA

34d • Hybrid

About The Position

Red Cell Partners is seeking Forward Deployed Engineers to join a new Stealth National Security incubation. This role is at the intersection of software engineering, customer delivery, product development, and mission execution. You will embed with customer teams, understand operational workflows, identify high-value use cases, and build production-ready systems to solve real mission problems. The role involves moving quickly from discovery to prototype to deployment while maintaining engineering discipline for secure and regulated environments. This is a hands-on engineering role requiring comfort with coding, debugging, working in customer environments, translating requirements into technical plans, and communicating with diverse stakeholders.

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 Secret clearance.
• U.S. citizenship is required.

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with federal, defense, intelligence, or other regulated customers.
• 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.

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.

Benefits

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.
• Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed