Forward Deployed Engineer, Federal/National Security
Venture studio that launches, operates, and scales technology companies across healthcare, cyber, and national security.
About Red Cell Partners
Red Cell Partners is a McLean, Virginia-based venture studio founded in 2020. It incubates and scales mission-critical technology companies across three practice areas — healthcare, cyber, and national security — with 15 companies created, 12 publicly launched, and over $600M raised across the firm and its incubations.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will work directly with federal and national-security customers to understand mission workflows, build and deploy AI-enabled applications and workflow automation, and own delivery from prototype through production. You will translate requirements into technical plans, integrate customer systems and infrastructure, debug deployed environments, and deliver secure, reliable, auditable systems.
Requirements
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Experience with backend engineering, distributed systems, APIs, data pipelines, cloud infrastructure, or applied AI/ML systems
- Ability to translate unclear requirements into working software
- Strong technical communication skills
- Ability to work across backend, frontend, infrastructure, integrations, and deployment workflows
- Strong debugging ability across application, data, infrastructure, networking, and customer systems
- Interest in national-security missions
- Active U.S. Secret clearance
- U.S. citizenship
- Preferred experience with federal, defense, intelligence, or regulated customers
- Preferred experience with AI agents, LLM applications, workflow orchestration, retrieval systems, Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, CI/CD, and observability
Responsibilities
- Understand customer mission workflows, pain points, data environments, and constraints
- Build and deploy AI-enabled applications, agents, integrations, and workflow automation
- Translate customer needs into technical requirements and implementation plans
- Own delivery from prototype through production
- Build architecture, backend services, APIs, integrations, observability, testing, and deployment
- Integrate customer systems, data sources, identity providers, and infrastructure
- Partner with product, engineering, security, and customer teams
- Debug deployed systems and drive resolution
- Contribute reusable engineering patterns, platform improvements, and documentation
Benefits
- Fully remote work
- Employer-paid medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families
- Unlimited paid time off
- 14 weeks of paid parental leave
- 401(k) option
- FSA
- Equity incentives
- Mental health benefits
- GLP-1 solutions