Forward Deployed Engineer, FDE US Government

About the role

A Forward Deployed Engineer II (FDE II) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to independently design, build, deploy, and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. FDE IIs write production-grade software and own delivery of complete AI workstreams end-to-end — from requirements gathering through production deployment — combining the technical rigor of an AWS SDE with the urgency and ownership required to deliver measurable customer business outcomes. FDE IIs are autonomous contributors who deliver working features spanning the full software lifecycle, design cohesive implementations for ambiguous problems, and coach others on producing high-quality code.

This position requires that the candidate selected be a US Citizen and currently possess and maintain an active TS/SCI clearance with Polygraph.

Responsibilities

• Embed within customer engineering teams and work with customers, stakeholders, and peers to understand the business and customer value of the systems you build.
• Understand the customer's business processes, technical architecture, and operational constraints.
• Translate customer requirements into technical designs for AI-enabled production systems within your workstream.
• Build production AI applications: design and develop production-grade software powering AI and agentic workflows — retrieval pipelines, workflow automation, API orchestration layers, data integration.
• Solve difficult problems with visible risks or roadblocks, bringing clarity and identifying simple designs for solutions.
• Integrate foundation models, customer data sources, and existing applications into cohesive AI experiences.
• Optimize for latency, reliability, and cost.
• Own production for your workstream: contribute to the full software development lifecycle including scoping, design, code, testing, deployment, operations, and maintenance.
• Troubleshoot production incidents across AI models, distributed systems, and application services.
• Ensure root causes of operational issues are identified and resolved.
• Implement monitoring, evaluations, guardrails, and CI/CD that keep AI systems healthy.
• Identify and execute on opportunities to improve operations.
• Mentor and uplift: actively mentor and train new team members on how systems are constructed, operated, and fit into the bigger picture.
• Coach others on producing high-quality code through mechanisms such as code review.
• Be active in the code review process, providing meaningful feedback to others.
• Identify opportunities to expand AI adoption within your customer engagement.
• Codify reusable patterns and accelerators that benefit future customer deployments and feed back into AWS services.
• Make enhancements that improve your team's software and processes.

Requirements

• 3+ years of non-internship professional software development experience
• Bachelor's degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• 2+ years of experience working in an Agile, startup, or rapidly scaling environment
• Experience communicating technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience with agentic and spec-driven development (developing AI agents a plus)
• Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering
• Current, active US Government Security Clearance of TS/SCI with Polygraph

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working with AWS Services
• Experience working in customer production environments
• Experience building or deploying AI/ML applications in production environments
• Background as a founder, engineering lead, or startup builder with high ownership and urgency
• Prior experience with React, TypeScript, Python, and/or Go
• Experience interfacing with customers or leading technical projects with external stakeholders
• Experience working with teams that build and scale end-to-end production systems

Pay

• USA, CO, Denver — $143,700.00 – $194,400.00 USD annually
• USA, NY, New York — $158,100.00 – $213,800.00 USD annually
• USA, VA, Arlington — $143,700.00 – $194,400.00 USD annually
• USA, WA, Seattle — $143,700.00 – $194,400.00 USD annually