Scale AI FDE

Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Public Sector

  • Location Austin, TX; Colorado Springs, CO; Honolulu, HI; Omaha, NE; St. Louis, MO; Washington, DC
  • Seniority mid
  • Posted 2024-10-09

Original posting ↗ You apply on the company site — we never collect applications.

Extracted automatically from public job postings. Always verify details on the original posting before applying.

role details

Embed with government customers to build and deploy AI applications, owning delivery from prototype to production.

Summary generated by AI from the original posting.

Hard requirements to check first

  • Clearance:Active TS/SCI clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.
  • Work auth:not mentioned in the posting
  • Customer site:yes — deployed at customer
  • Travel:customer-facing; travel not stated

Skills

PythonTypeScriptKubernetesDockerTerraformAWSAzureGCPReactLinuxNetworking fundamentalsCloud platforms

Excerpt from the original posting

At Scale, we build the AI systems behind some of the country's most important decisions. On the Public Sector Engineering team, you'll embed directly with U.S. government customers, including the Army, Air Force, Joint commands and Intelligence Community, to build and deploy AI applications that support their most critical missions.

This is a hybrid customer-facing engineering role. You'll sit with the people whose problems you're solving, own delivery from first prototype to production, and ship software that customers adopt and rely on in the field. Model performance matters, timelines are urgent, and ambiguity is the norm. Your work directly shapes what Scale's platform can do for the public sector.

What you'll do 

- Embed with government customers to understand their mission, scope the problem, and turn it into working software.

- Own delivery end-to-end: design, build, deploy, and maintain solutions at customer sites, from prototype to stable production.

- Build robust backend systems and data integrations that connect customer environments to Scale's platform and back.

- Partner with product and engineering to feed field signals back into the roadmap, so the patterns you build once become capabilities the whole team can reuse.

- Serve as the technical point of contact for customer stakeholders, guiding adoption and maximizing mission impact.

What we're looking for 

Required 

- 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in customer-facing, forward-deployed, or government contexts.

- Strong production coding in Python and TypeScript (or comparable modern languages).

- Comfort across the stack, including cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containers, Linux, and networking fundamentals.

- Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and make sound trade-offs under pressure.

- An active TS/SCI clearance, or eligibility to obtain one. 

Bonus 

- Experience building or deploying systems powered by LLMs or generative models.

- Familiarity with Node and React, Kubernetes and Docker, and Terraform.

- Data engineering background covering ETL pipelines, data modeling, and data governance.

Location and travel 

This role requires significant time on-site with customers. Expect 25% travel with up to 50% travel as necessary, and/or relocation to Washington DC or St. Louis.
Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting…

Scale AI · Greenhouse

Verify before you apply

  • The title, level and compensation match the original posting.
  • The role is still open — postings often close without notice, we drop them within 10 days of disappearing.
  • What "remote" means here: sometimes it is remote within one country only. The location field shows the employer’s own wording.
  • Work authorization, visa sponsorship and security clearance — these are the most common reasons an application goes nowhere.