Lead Forward Deployed Engineer

About Lumbra

Lumbra builds the vendor neutral operating system for agentic AI in high consequence environments. In our first ten months we won four fully competed prime contracts across the U.S. Government, every one of them deploying into classified spaces. We are live on JWICS. We were selected from a field of 200+ companies for a defense innovation challenge and won it. We beat two established defense primes on the same program and earned the follow-on, now in execution.

About the Role

Nebula, our agentic harness, is deployed in classified environments across the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense.

As a Lead Forward Deployed Engineer you manage the team embedded at a customer site. You manage three to five people across both field roles, Forward Deployed Engineers and Deployment Strategists, you own the technical outcome for the engagement, and you serve as Lumbra's senior technical counterpart to the customer.

This role is on client site 80 to 100% of the time. It is not eligible for remote or hybrid work.

How the Role Is Structured

We publish the time allocation because it is the most common source of mismatch in senior field roles:

• 40% engineering. You write code, configure agents, build workflows, and operate the platform.

• 40% managing the team. Work assignment, performance, and growth for three to five direct reports across both field roles.

• 20% customer engagement. Program office, end users, and government technical leadership.

What You'll Own

• Technical delivery for one engagement, from kickoff through operational acceptance and handoff.

• The integration approach. You set it, and you translate mission requirements into platform configuration.

• A team of three to five Forward Deployed Engineers and Deployment Strategists: work assignment, performance, and development across both disciplines.

• Either lane, as the engagement demands. You cover FDE systems and integration work or DS workflow and agent design work, and you remain the most capable Nebula operator on the team.

• The customer relationship on technical matters, including senior government technical leadership.

• The workflows worth encoding. You work with your Deployment Strategists to identify the analyst workflows that matter, then build them in Nebula.

• Hiring onto your own team. You will interview and select the engineers and strategists who report to you, including a forward deployed seat supporting a geographically separated element several time zones away.

• The feedback loop to core engineering. Engagement learnings go back weekly, and they shape the roadmap.

• Government facing technical artifacts, including RFIs, RFPs, statements of work, and white papers.

You'll Work Alongside

CIA officers, MIT engineers, Special Operations combat veterans, and applied AI engineers from frontier labs including Anthropic and Google. You will make decisions that immediately affect national security. You will own part of a company early and when it matters.

What This Role Is Not

• A pure engineering role. Roughly 60% of the week is people management and customer engagement.

• A management role without hands-on work. You are expected to be the most capable Nebula operator on the team.

• A management of managers role. Your reports are individual contributors across both field roles.

• A role you can do from home. Your team sits at the customer site, and so do you.

Required Qualifications

• Roughly 3 to 7 years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time in customer facing or forward deployed technical roles. We are flexible on years: what matters is depth of experience and the scope of what you have owned end to end.

• Demonstrated end to end ownership of a customer engagement: discovery, architecture, implementation, deployment, and adoption.

• Strong Python. Working fluency in Kubernetes, and the ability to reason independently about deployment, networking, and data flow.

• Enough AI agent and workflow fluency to direct Deployment Strategist work, not only engineering.

• Experience managing or formally mentoring engineers.

• Willingness to work on client site 80 to 100% of the time in the National Capital Region, plus periodic CONUS and OCONUS travel to supported units.

• U.S. citizenship and an active TS/SCI clearance.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior forward deployed or embedded engineering experience at a product company.

• Experience building or evaluating agentic systems and LLM applications, including handling non-deterministic behavior.

• Experience deploying and operating software in air-gapped or SCIF environments, including disconnected package management and offline container registries.

• Prior work with Intelligence Community or DoD tooling, data formats, or analytic workflows.

• Familiarity with workflow orchestration such as Temporal for durable, multi-step tasks.

• Experience growing a team from one or two people into a functioning unit.

Compensation

The base salary range for this role is $200,000 to $300,000, plus equity and benefits. Where an offer lands depends on scope, autonomy, and technical capability, which we assess through the interview process rather than by years or title. Our ranges are a real guide, and we are flexible for the right person: if your experience clearly exceeds this role's scope, we will consider you at a higher level, with that level's range. Base salary is one part of total compensation, alongside equity and the benefits below.What We Offer

What We Offer

• Health, dental, and vision insurance. 99% of your premiums covered, and 100% of your dependents' premiums.

• Optional HSA plan. Lower premium, HSA eligible, fully portable, self directed or managed.

• Health Reimbursement Account for qualified healthcare expenses.

• Life insurance of $150,000 plus AD&D, 100% company paid.

• 401(k) with a 100% match on the first 6%, immediately vested. No cliff, no waiting period. Yours from day one.

• Wellhub Gold. Everything from Gold's Gym to Lifetime, fully covered, plus [solidcore], F45, and hundreds of other studios.

• Unlimited PTO. Real time off, not accrual based. Take what you need, no counting required.

• Every federal holiday, plus additional paid days off over the winter break.

• Supportive leave of absence program, including time off for military service, medical events, and parental leave.

• Breakfast, lunch, and endless snacks every day you are in the office.

• Pre-tax commuter benefits.

• Company phone plan. A new iPhone, fully company paid.