Forward Deployed Engineer

Forward Deployed Engineer (TS/SCI Clearance Required)

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

Forward Deployed Engineers build and deploy Nebula inside customer environments. Nebula, our agentic harness, runs in classified environments across the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense, and our field organization is structured as small teams embedded at a single customer site for the life of an engagement.

You work directly with analysts and operators to understand what they need, then implement it: connectors against undocumented data sources, agent and integration work against undocumented workflows, and debugging in environments where standard tooling is unavailable.

You report to the lead for your engagement and work alongside the Deployment Strategists on the same team.

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

How the Role Is Structured

We publish the time allocation because field engineering is not the same job as platform engineering:

• 65% engineering. Connector and integration development, MCP server construction, platform operation, and troubleshooting in air-gapped environments.

• 25% users. Demonstrations, training, and acting on analyst feedback directly rather than routing it through someone else.

• 10% feeding the product back. Documenting what you learn on site and getting it to core engineering.

What You'll Own

• Working software in classified customer environments. You build it and you deploy it.

• Integrations against customer data sources, including tool development, MCP server construction, and authentication.

• Platform operation, so your team's workflows run reliably. You configure agents and workflows in partnership with the Deployment Strategist, who owns whether their output is mission correct.

• The user relationship. You demonstrate the platform, deliver training, and act on feedback directly.

• Troubleshooting in air-gapped environments where external registries, package managers, and standard debugging tools are unavailable.

• Test coverage for error cases, network failures, and disconnected environment edge conditions.

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

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 deployment role that hands off to someone else for user interaction.

• A domain or workflow role without production engineering responsibility.

• A role that operates from fully specified requirements.

• A remote engineering job with occasional site visits. You sit with your users.

Required Qualifications

• Deep professional software engineering experience, regardless of years: we care about what you have built, owned, and shipped, not a year count. Roughly 2+ years is typical, but depth and ownership matter most. Strong Python.

• Experience building and operating reliable integrations, including authentication, rate limiting, and error recovery.

• Working fluency in Kubernetes and containerized deployment.

• Demonstrated experience working directly with non-technical users.

• 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

• Experience deploying 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 workflows in IL6+ environments.

• Experience with agentic systems, LLM application development, or evaluation of non-deterministic systems.

• Helm chart authoring, workflow orchestration such as Temporal, and graph databases for entity resolution.

• Rancher, ArgoCD, or Harbor in restricted environments.

• Experience with, or genuine willingness to learn, the J2 and intelligence processes your users work in: the intelligence cycle, all source fusion, and at J2 sites, JIPOE and the Joint Targeting Cycle and F2T2EA. You build against these workflows, so understanding them is an advantage.

• Exposure to the intelligence tooling your users rely on, such as i2 Analyst's Notebook, MARS/MIDB, PROTON, ArcGIS Pro, TAC, FADE/MIST, VOLTRON, and OSINT platforms such as Babel Street, Maltego, Dataminr, or Recorded Future. A plus, not expected.

Compensation

The base salary range for this role is $150,000 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.