Forward Deployed Engineer

Red Cell Partners • McLean, VA

4d • $180,000 - $240,000

About The Position

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in technology-led companies in healthcare, cyber, and national security. Trase Systems, co-founded in 2023, provides an end-to-end platform for deploying, managing, and optimizing enterprise AI, with a focus on making AI adoption simpler and safer. Its work includes mission-critical agentic applications in complex industries.

The role is described as a Staff Software Engineer position that divides time between building Trase’s core product and delivering solutions directly to customers. The engineer will work with customer teams to understand their workflows, data environments, constraints, and valuable use cases, then develop and deploy production-ready systems. Learning from deployments will inform reusable platform capabilities, engineering patterns, and the product roadmap.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role involving technical direction and architecture decisions as well as coding, debugging, and delivery in complex customer environments. The engineer will take solutions from discovery and prototype through production, communicating with technical and non-technical stakeholders and maintaining engineering discipline in secure or regulated settings. Some travel to customers may be required.

Requirements

• At least 8 years of software engineering experience building and shipping production-quality systems.
• Ability to apply AI and machine learning techniques, including LLM approaches such as RAG, guardrails, and evaluations, to customer problems.
• Experience designing scalable systems that can reliably accommodate growth in usage, data, and complexity.
• Experience with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, or applied AI/ML systems.
• Ability to work across the full stack when needed, including backend services, frontend interfaces, infrastructure, integrations, and deployment workflows.
• Ability to work in ambiguous customer environments and turn unclear requirements into working software.
• Strong technical communication skills with engineers, product teams, executives, and customer stakeholders.
• Strong 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.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience as a full-stack or backend software engineer, forward deployed engineer, solutions engineer, product engineer, platform engineer, or founding/startup engineer.
• Experience with AI agents, LLM applications, workflow orchestration, evaluations, guardrails, retrieval systems, or model deployment.
• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• 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.
• Comfort working in secure or regulated customer environments.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand their workflows, pain points, data environments, and operational constraints.
• Contribute to the core platform and customer-specific integrations, building reusable product capabilities and adapting and deploying them in customer environments.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, agents, and workflow automation using techniques such as RAG, guardrails, and evaluations.
• 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-premises infrastructure.
• Partner with product, engineering, security, and customer teams to make solutions secure, reliable, auditable, and operationally useful.
• Debug deployed-environment issues and drive resolution across application, infrastructure, data, and integration layers.
• Exercise sound judgment in environments involving sensitive data and business-critical workflows.
• Set technical direction, make architecture decisions, and uphold engineering standards while remaining hands-on with coding and debugging.

Benefits

• Career-track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement as the firm grows, based on strong performance.
• 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for the employee and family.
• Paid maternity and paternity leave for 14 weeks at normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO with management approval.
• Professional development and continued-learning opportunities.
• Optional 401(k), FSA, and equity incentives.
• Mental health benefits through Tara Mind.
• Cost-effective GLP-1 solutions through Crux.

What This Job Offers

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