Forward Deployed Engineer - Security Clearance Eligible
$180,000–$230,000 year
On-siteArlington, Virginia, United States
Job Summary
Own technical delivery into federal and national security environments, from first prototype through operational acceptance and sustainment. Embed with customer teams worldwide to learn workflows, threat models, and constraints that never make it into a requirements document. Configure, integrate, and tune mobile core capabilities against each mission profile while running pilots, exercises, and demos to produce decision-quality evidence. Provide live technical support during operations and incidents, performing root-cause analysis and pushing preventive fixes into the platform. Write production-grade code for glue, integrations, tooling, and one-off capabilities that unblock deployments, then prototype features in the field to validate against real mission use. Translate mission requirements into prioritized engineering asks and constraints back into operator language, partnering with business development to convert pilots into programs of record. Travel up to 50% to customer sites, military installations, and partner locations.
Required Qualifications
- 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
Desired Qualifications
- 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
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