Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, FederalNational Security

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare cyber and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nations most pressing problems.

About the Role

We are hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to join a new Stealth National Security incubation within Red Cell. Youll work directly with federal and national-security customers and your role will sit at the intersection of software engineering customer delivery product development and mission execution.

As an FDE you will embed with customer teams understand operational workflows identify high-value use cases and build production-ready systems that solve real mission problems. You will move quickly from discovery to prototype to deployment while maintaining the engineering discipline required for secure and regulated environments.

This is a highly hands-on engineering role. You should be comfortable writing code debugging systems working with messy customer environments translating vague requirements into concrete technical plans and communicating clearly with both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

What Youll Do

• Work directly with federal and national-security customers to understand mission workflows pain points data environments and operational constraints.
• Build and deploy AI-enabled applications agents integrations and workflow automation in secure customer environments.
• 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-prem infrastructure.
• Partner with product engineering security and customer teams to ensure solutions are secure reliable auditable and operationally useful.
• Debug issues in deployed environments and drive fast resolution across application infrastructure data and integration layers.
• Contribute reusable patterns platform improvements and documentation back to the broader engineering organization.
• Operate with strong judgment in environments involving sensitive data government stakeholders and mission-critical workflows.

What Were Looking For

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to build production-quality systems.
• Experience with backend engineering distributed systems APIs data pipelines cloud infrastructure or applied AI/ML systems.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous customer environments and turn unclear requirements into working software.
• Strong technical communication skills with engineers product teams executives and customer stakeholders.
• Comfort working across the full stack when needed including backend services frontend interfaces infrastructure integrations and deployment workflows.
• High 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.
• Interest in national-security missions and willingness to work in secure or restricted environments.
• Active Secret clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with federal defense intelligence or other regulated customers.
• Top Secret or TS/SCI clearance.
• Prior experience as a Forward Deployed Engineer Solutions Engineer Mission Engineer Product Engineer Platform Engineer or founding/startup engineer.
• Experience with AI agents LLM applications workflow orchestration evals guardrails retrieval systems or model deployment.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS Azure GCP or government cloud environments.
• 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.

Technical Stack

Our stack may include TypeScript Python Java React FastAPI or similar backend frameworks Postgres cloud infrastructure containerized services workflow orchestration observability tooling and LLM / agentic AI frameworks. We care less about exact tool familiarity and more about strong engineering judgment adaptability and ability to ship in complex environments.

Clearance / Eligibility

Because this role supports federal and national-security customers U.S. citizenship is required with an active security clearance. Candidates without an active clearance may be considered if they are eligible and willing to obtain one.

Location

Washington DC / Northern Virginia preferred. This role may require regular customer-facing work including onsite meetings secure-facility work or travel depending on program needs.

Why This Role

This is a chance to build software that directly supports national-security missions. You will work on high-impact problems where AI automation and modern engineering can materially improve how mission teams operate. You will not be far removed from the user or buried in a narrow implementation lane; you will be expected to understand the mission build the system deploy it and make it work in the real world.

If you want to be on the cutting edge of technology building AI solutions for the future and are up for a challenge lets talk!

Salary Range: $00. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience skills and other factors.

#LI-RCP

Our Red Cell Partners Benefits:

For full-time roles

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement withstrong performanceas the firm grows
• 100% employer paid comprehensive health care including medical dental and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K FSA and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.
  
• Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available throughCrux.

Were an Equal Opportunity Employer: Youll receive consideration for employment without regard to race sex color religion sexual orientation gender identity national origin protected veteran status or on the basis of disability.

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