Forward Deployed AI Engineer, Portugal

Description

This role sits in the Forward Deployed Engineering department and is hands-on AI building for defence and intelligence customers.

You will put the company's intelligence platform into secure, often air-gapped, environments and quickly deliver AI workflows on top of it, from containerised deployments to retrieval systems that combine SAR imagery with intelligence reports.

The company owns a SAR satellite constellation, serves customers in defence, intelligence, environmental monitoring, insurance and emergency management, and runs sovereign systems for governments that operate their own constellations.

Founded and headquartered in Finland, the company has over 1000 employees across Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Responsibilities

• Deploy the platform into customer secure settings such as on-premise sites, air-gapped networks and classified data centres.
• Keep Docker-based applications running and handle rollouts across the Kubernetes clusters customers operate.
• Create APIs and data pipelines that link the company's systems to customer C4ISR infrastructure and intelligence tools.
• Diagnose deployment faults in disconnected environments that have no external internet access.
• Build RAG systems that join the company's SAR data with customer intelligence documents for context-aware analysis.
• Develop AI agents and workflows with LangChain, LangGraph or similar tools to automate analytical tasks.
• Design prompt strategies and conversational interfaces that let analysts query satellite data in plain language.
• Build Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations between AI systems and customer data sources.
• Build data fusion pipelines that combine SAR imagery with AIS, RF, optical and SIGINT sources.
• Automate workflows that correlate and cross-check information across data types.
• Make lightweight tools, dashboards and alerts suited to each customer's operations.
• Work alongside intelligence analysts, data scientists and military operators to understand critical problems.
• Prototype AI solutions quickly, code first and polish later, to meet immediate operational needs.
• Run hands-on training on platform features and AI workflow use.
• Turn customer feedback into technical requirements for the product and engineering teams.

Requirements

• You have 3+ years of hands-on experience building and deploying production systems.
• Python is required, and you also know one of Go, TypeScript or Rust.
• You have hands-on experience with LLMs, prompt engineering and RAG systems.
• You know agent frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph or pydantic-ai, and vector databases.
• You have used Docker and deployed into secure, isolated or air-gapped environments.
• You have practical experience with APIs, data pipelines and integrating systems in production.
• You are familiar with Linux and basic Kubernetes operations.
• You work as a builder: you ship fast, iterate on feedback and favour working solutions over perfect architecture.
• You communicate well with customers, can work embedded with intelligence analysts or military operators, and have strong spoken and written English.
• You can explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• You are willing to travel 40 to 60% of the time to customer sites within the region.
• You have experience in defence, intelligence or government operational environments.
• You have deployed to on-premise data centres and or air-gapped networks.
• You are familiar with geospatial data, satellite imagery or remote sensing.
• You have experience with MCP integrations, multi-agent systems or agentic workflows.
• You have deeper Kubernetes skills, infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible) and or offline CI/CD experience.
• You understand intelligence analysis workflows and defence or government requirements.
• You have experience with data fusion, multi-source intelligence integration or GIS tools such as ArcGIS and QGIS.
• You have a background in solution engineering, technical consulting or customer success.
• You have experience in defence tech, for example at Palantir, Anduril, Scale AI or similar startups.

Conditions

You report to the VP, Forward Deployed Engineering.

The role is hybrid, with about 50% of your time on site at customer locations.

You must be eligible and able to obtain relevant national and NATO security clearances.

You must live in the country you deploy to and be a native-level speaker of its language.

Applicants are considered without regard to background, and adjustments during recruitment are available on request.

Benefits

• Health and wellbeing benefits are offered, and they vary by location.
• Talent Acquisition confirms which benefits apply to this role and location during the hiring process.
• Continuous professional development and training opportunities are available.