Staff Forward Deployed Engineer, Federal/National Security
Redcellpartners · McLean, VA · Posted Jul 8, 2026
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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 Nation’s most pressing problems.
About the Role
We are hiring Forward Deployed Engineers to join a new Stealth National Security incubation within Red Cell. You'll 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 You’ll 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 We’re 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 …