Forward Deployed Engineer - Public Sector

The role

Forward Deployed Engineers own technical execution for strategic customer engagements from discovery to production delivery. You will deploy open models into secure, classified, or edge environments for U.S. government customers.

What you will do

• Design, deploy, and operate agentic systems in air-gapped and classified networks
• Work on-site with government customers in SCIFs
• Translate mission requirements into secure AI solutions meeting accreditation and compliance standards
• Lead technical discovery with customer teams
• Own proofs of concept end to end
• Architect and build complex AI systems including agentic applications and model-serving infrastructure
• Manage customer relationships and project plans
• Identify repeatable patterns and model gaps to shape platform and research priorities
• Build prototypes to validate customer needs
• Define playbooks, reference architectures, and best practices

Required qualifications

• Experience delivering software into classified or air-gapped government environments
• Strong technical fluency in Python and shipping production-grade systems
• Track record of leading complex technical projects
• Experience deploying multi-node GPU clusters (Kubernetes or Slurm)
• Experience serving large models in production (vLLM, SGLang)
• Experience benchmarking quantization, caching, batching and speculative decoding
• Experience shipping LLM-based agents to production in the last 1–2 years
• 5+ years of relevant experience delivering technical systems
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role
• Active U.S. government clearance

Nice to have

• TS/SCI clearance

Benefits

• Salary and equity
• Stock options
• Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and life
• Annual wellness allowance
• Lunch and dinner provided in the office daily
• 22 weeks paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off in the U.S.
• 30 days paid time off in the U.K.
• Visa sponsorship support
• Regular off-sites, happy hours, and team celebrations

Before you apply

• Requires an active U.S. government clearance
• May require access to technology or source code subject to U.S. Export Administration Regulations

About the company

Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. They build open models to help shape the future of AI.