Senior Forward Deployed Engineer (AI)

Location: Onsite in San Francisco, United States

Company

Early-stage defense AI company developing technology to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operations.

What you will do

• Work directly with technical and non-technical customers to understand ambiguous requirements and identify their underlying needs.
• Design and build full-stack software solutions from scratch when required.
• Own the complete delivery cycle from discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment, and post-launch validation.
• Configure existing product capabilities and write new code where necessary.
• Use customer feedback, adoption, and real-world usage to evaluate solution effectiveness.
• Move across product, frontend, backend, and infrastructure work without relying on separate handoff teams.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience delivering finished software used by real customers, users, or demanding internal stakeholders.
• Strong full-stack engineering skills and the ability to build substantial production software.
• Experience owning ambiguous requirements without a detailed specification, roadmap, or product-management translation layer.
• Ability to explain the customer request, the underlying need, the delivered solution, and the post-launch outcome.
• Strong communication, people skills, technical judgment, and personal ownership of solution design and delivery.
• Ability to work independently and move quickly with incomplete information.

Nice to have

• Experience in forward deployed engineering, go-to-market engineering, product engineering, consulting, agency work, freelancing, or early-stage startups.

Culture & Benefits

• Very small, senior technical team with high ownership.
• Hands-on environment with low bureaucracy and direct communication with users.
• Work on national-security problems involving large-scale multimodal data, signal extraction, applied ML, and agentic systems.
• Competitive base salary plus meaningful equity.