FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER

About the role

A stealth-emerged AI biodefense company — founded by veterans of Palantir, DeepMind, MIT's Broad Institute, and the Arc Institute, and backed by OpenAI, Lux Capital, Founders Fund, and other top-tier investors — is building frontier AI systems that identify biological threats and design medical countermeasures in real time. Forward Deployed Engineers are the connective tissue between the platform and the operators using it, deploying directly alongside users at national security agencies, national laboratories, and pharmaceutical companies. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of applied AI and biosecurity, shaping the tools that keep pace with nature's evolving mutational landscape.

Responsibilities

• End-to-End Platform Ownership: Own the full deployment lifecycle of the platform in customer environments, from scoping requirements through go-live and ongoing iteration.
• Deep Customer Embedding: Embed directly with government and commercial users to deeply understand their missions, workflows, and pain points across biosurveillance, threat characterization, and countermeasure design.
• Custom Integrations & Tooling: Build integrations, custom tooling, and configurations that connect platform capabilities to customer-specific data sources, infrastructure, and operational needs.
• Translating Biology to Production: Translate complex computational biology methods into production-quality, user-facing workflows, packaging research artifacts into tools that are reliable, usable, and maintainable.
• Go-to-Market & Business Development: Play a key role in go-to-market and business development; work to shape and incept funding for biodefense, source opportunities and contracts, write and submit proposals.
• Technical Customer Face: Serve as the technical face of the company in customer engagements, working directly with scientists, analysts, and senior government stakeholders.
• Field-to-Product Feedback Loop: Close the feedback loop between the field and the product team, synthesizing customer needs into actionable engineering and product requirements that shape the roadmap.
• Rapid Prototyping & Full-Stack Shipping: Rapidly prototype and ship custom solutions when standard product capabilities do not yet meet a mission need, working across the full stack.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering background with demonstrated ability to build and ship production systems.
• Expertise with Python, React, TypeScript, and other common languages and technologies.
• Mastery of data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical underpinnings of modern application stacks.
• Deep understanding of how technical decisions impact the end user, and how to balance tradeoffs between technical complexity and speed of iteration.

Bonus Points

• Prior experience in a forward-deployed, customer-facing engineering role (e.g., Palantir-style FDE or equivalent).
• Familiarity with biosecurity, biosurveillance, or computational biology workflows and data types.
• Experience working with classified or highly regulated environments, including national security agencies or national laboratories.
• Background in proposal writing, government contracting, or federal procurement processes.
• Exposure to genomic or sequence data pipelines, variant analysis, or biological threat characterization tooling.
• Experience deploying AI/ML models in production environments with real operational users.

What success looks like

Within the first few months, you have embedded with at least one government or commercial customer, scoped and shipped a custom integration that directly addresses a live mission need, and contributed actionable product requirements back to the core engineering team. Over time, you are recognized as the technical authority in your customer engagements and have materially shaped both the product roadmap and new contract opportunities in the biodefense space.