Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Public Sector
Compensation: $167,000 – $203,000 base salary, plus equity, company benefits, and incentive compensation.
Location: Washington, DC or San Francisco, CA. These are the only two locations under consideration. No other locations, and no fully remote option.
Role Type: Full-Time Employee, Individual Contributor
Work Model: Customer-facing, with regular on-site engagement and up to 50% travel
Clearance: U.S. Citizenship required; active clearance preferred, eligibility and willingness to obtain one required
Client name withheld. Sitreps Talent is managing the search, and interested candidates apply through Sitreps.
About the Client
Our client is a venture-backed AI security company. Their platform helps government and enterprise customers put AI systems into production safely: evaluating models and applications before deployment, protecting sensitive data and enforcing policy at runtime, governing what AI agents are allowed to do, and maintaining the evidence trail oversight bodies require. The platform runs across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, edge, and air-gapped environments. The team is standing up a dedicated public sector organization, and these are early seats on it.
About the Role
Our client is looking for a Senior Forward Deployed Engineer to help public sector customers deploy and operationalize their platform in mission-critical environments.
This is a hands-on engineering role at the intersection of software engineering, customer deployment, AI assurance, and government technology. You will write code, debug complex systems, build integrations, support deployments, and create demos, prototypes, and workflows that help customers adopt the platform.
You will work directly with customer engineering teams, mission users, security stakeholders, and the company's product and engineering teams to translate operational needs into working software, deployment architectures, and product feedback that shapes the roadmap and the public sector strategy.
Responsibilities
- Become deeply fluent in the company's evaluation, guardrail, and agent governance platform.
- Work directly with federal customers to understand mission needs, technical requirements, pain points, and operational constraints, and convert them into practical solution architectures, integrations, and implementation plans.
- Create tailored demos, prototypes, workflows, and collateral for federal executives, technical teams, and mission users, helping translate validated use cases into initial deployments.
- Deploy, integrate, and support the platform across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, air-gapped, and government-controlled environments.
- Troubleshoot complex implementations in partnership with engineering, platform, security, and customer teams.
- Bring field learnings back to product, engineering, research, and go-to-market teams to shape roadmap, delivery patterns, and customer strategy.
You Might Thrive in This Role If You
- Have a strong technical foundation in software engineering, computer science, applied mathematics, or another quantitative field.
- Communicate clearly with technical and non-technical audiences, from hands-on users to senior government stakeholders.
- Enjoy solving hard technical problems in real customer environments, not just in controlled demos.
- Are comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous settings where you may need to build, test, explain, and iterate quickly.
- Work well across users, engineers, product teams, security stakeholders, and mission owners.
- Like turning field feedback into practical product improvements, deployment patterns, and customer value.
- Are excited to help deploy custom AI evaluations, runtime controls, and agent governance systems in high-stakes public sector environments.
Requirements
Preferred Qualifications
- 5+ years in customer-facing engineering roles, including solutions, sales, product, forward-deployed, or implementation engineering.
- Strong coding ability in Python plus TypeScript, Java, Go, Bash, or similar.
- Experience building, deploying, integrating, or operating production software systems across cloud, containerized, on-prem, or enterprise environments.
- Working knowledge of AI/ML systems, including GenAI, LLM applications, evaluation, guardrails, observability, or agentic workflows.
- Strong debugging, problem-solving, and technical communication skills, with the ability to operate independently in ambiguous customer environments.
- Willingness to travel regularly to customer sites.
- U.S. Citizenship required; active U.S. security clearance preferred, with eligibility and willingness to obtain one required.
Nice to Have
- Experience supporting Department of War, IC, federal civilian, or other public sector customers.
- Familiarity with RMF, FedRAMP, IL environments, ATO processes, CMMC, or government software accreditation.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, platform engineering, or enterprise integrations.
- Experience integrating with IdAM providers, SIEMs, data platforms, APIs, secure networks, or logging and monitoring tools.
- Hands-on experience with AI evaluation, red-teaming, runtime guardrails, model observability, AI governance, or agentic systems.
- Prior experience at a defense-tech, AI, cybersecurity, cloud, or enterprise SaaS company.
- Active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance.