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Salary: USD 138,000 - 292,560 / annual
Scale is hiring a Forward Deployed Software Engineer to embed directly with U.S. government customers—including the Army, Air Force, Joint commands, and Intelligence Community—to build and deploy AI applications supporting critical national security missions.
In this hybrid customer-facing role, you'll sit alongside the people whose problems you're solving, owning delivery from first prototype to production. You'll 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 Scale's platform capabilities for the public sector.
Key responsibilities:
- Embed with government customers to understand their mission, scope problems, and translate them into working software.
- Own end-to-end delivery: design, build, deploy, and maintain solutions at customer sites, from prototype to stable production.
- Build robust backend systems and data integrations connecting customer environments to Scale's platform.
- Partner with product and engineering to feed field signals back into the roadmap, turning patterns you build into reusable capabilities.
- Serve as the technical point of contact for customer stakeholders, guiding adoption and maximizing mission impact.
Required qualifications:
- 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: cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), containers, Linux, and networking fundamentals.
- Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and make sound trade-offs under pressure.
- Active TS/SCI clearance or eligibility to obtain one.
Bonus experience:
- Building or deploying systems powered by LLMs or generative models.
- Node, React, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform.
- Data engineering background (ETL pipelines, data modeling, data governance).
This role requires significant on-site time with customers: expect 25% travel with up to 50% as necessary, and/or relocation to Washington DC or St. Louis.
