Forward Deployed Research Engineer (FDRE - Clearance)

poolside•New York, NY

53d•Remote

About The Position

As an FDRE, you'll be embedded with customers, figuring out how to build real agentic systems to solve hard problems. Hard problems aren’t solved from an armchair; the right to solve them comes from experience, resilience, and a little scar tissue, earned by engaging with reality. This role gives you direct exposure to frontier AI R&D and a front-row seat to the most valuable problems and industries on the planet. You’ll operate at the intersection of software engineering, applied AI and agent research, and product - designing and deploying high-reliability systems, while feeding signal back into our products and models. This role requires US clearance.

Requirements

Exceptional, high-agency, low-ego. You bias to action, collaborate well, and are motivated by impact and outcome.
Learning-driven. You pick up new domains quickly, ask sharp questions, and turn are comfortable with ambiguity.
Product-minded. You translate field pain into clean abstractions, docs, and tools others can use.
Adventurer. You are eager and willing to travel and experience new things, and meet unforeseen challenges with creativity and resourcefulness.
If you’re unsure whether you check every box, you should still apply! Impact beats pedigree here.

Nice To Haves

Software engineering & platforms: Backend services at scale; distributed systems; data/feature pipelines; queues/caching; fault tolerance.
Agentic/LLM systems: multi-agent systems; agent communication/delegation; evals; long-running, fault-tolerant agents; tools/prompt/program design; guardrails.
Evaluation & experimentation: Designing evals; monitoring performance/drift; fundamentals of Data Science/ML; able to turn a hazy problem into a structured exploration.
Cloud & ops: Kubernetes, Docker, IaC (Terraform/CDK), networking, secrets, observability (Grafana/Prometheus/Datadog), CI/CD.
Model ops: Fine-tuning/RL; designing agent environments; managing inference.
Enterprise delivery: Security/compliance, data governance, integration with legacy systems.

Responsibilities

Own the mission end-to-end. Be the technical owner in the field, clarify goals, shape the plan, make the hard calls, and ship systems that move real metrics.
Partner for impact. Work directly with operators and executives to scope what matters most, then turn it into production results.
Build with research in the loop. Collaborate with AI R&D on prompts, tools, and model improvements; bring back field-signals that make the next model, and the platform, better.
Turn wins into a flywheel. Convert patterns into playbooks, products, and libraries so that every deployment is faster, more powerful, and more reliable than the last.