Forward Deployed Engineer

About the company:Our client is an AI company helping government agencies find and stop improper spending. Its agentic platform pulls together public and restricted government data, reasons across it and surfaces specific cases with the evidence chain auditors need to act. The team has already uncovered significant, previously unidentified issues across several agencies and is in active conversations with federal, defense, homeland security and state-level partners. The main constraint on growth is engineering headcount.About the role:You’ll join the first cohort of forward deployed engineers, a Member of Technical Staff role that spans applied AI research and production systems, embedded with government partners. There are two teams of roughly equal size. One works with defense and homeland security, with regular on-site days at a secure government facility and a security clearance that is sponsored. The other works with federal health agencies and state and local governments.What you’ll own:Agentic AI systems for high-stakes government missions, from proof of concept to productionLLM applications, including multi-agent frameworks, tool-calling agents, RAG pipelines and human-in-the-loop workflowsData curation and evaluation pipelines for model training and iterationInfrastructure for inference, experimentation, evaluation and deploymentWhat you’ll bring:1-4 years of production engineering with real shipping ownershipStrong Python, and deep hands-on experience with LLMs and agents (RAG, tool calling, multi-agent, context management)Fundamentals first, not a vibe coder, with a track record in data pipelines and ML infrastructureExcellent verbal communication, able to represent the company with partnersAn ex-founder or founding-engineer mindset: collaborative and low egoBased in the Washington, DC area or willing to relocate quickly, in person five days a weekBackground that stands out:Ex-founder or founding engineer of a company that grew or exitedForward-deployed or federal work at defense-tech and AI companiesApplied engineering at leading AI companiesAn active security clearancePrior fraud or healthcare-fraud analytics workThe details:In the office in Washington, DC, five days a week, full-time. US citizens only. Applicants must be based in the DC area or able to relocate quickly.