Mission Delivery Engineer - CA

Description

The company is a small, well-funded startup building a platform that makes GenAI deployment simpler. The team works with high urgency and a long-term view, with a flat structure, open communication and little bureaucracy.

This is a forward-deployed, hands-on role serving U.S. federal customers. You own the work from pre-sales discovery and proof-of-value (PoV) demos of custom applications through to production and handover to the customer or an integration partner.

The role combines pre-sales technical work, post-sale implementation, operations support, enablement and structured handover. It is not a pure presentation role or a back-office engineering role.

The first 180 days are planned as three phases: platform mastery and delivery tooling, PoV impact and production conversion, then scaling repeatable playbooks and partner enablement.

Responsibilities

• Run technical discovery with DoD, IC and federal customers, covering mission workflows, data sources, operating constraints including DDIL, stakeholders and success criteria.
• Turn discovery into a use case definition, a solution outline and a measurable PoV plan that states what success looks like, how it is measured and what data is needed.
• Set out the path from PoV to production early, including architecture assumptions, integration points, security considerations and the conditions that must hold before go-live.
• Design and deliver tailored demos, whiteboard sessions and hands-on workshops for executive and practitioner audiences.
• Build rapid prototypes and custom applications on the platform using real or representative customer data, often on short timelines.
• Show mission workflows such as RAG, agentic orchestration, streaming or event-driven ingestion and edge inference, matched to customer constraints.
• Add basic evaluation and guardrails to PoVs, including grounding checks, policy constraints and transparency, to build credibility with stakeholders.
• Turn successful PoVs into production systems by hardening code, modularizing components, adding tests and matching customer engineering standards.
• Design and build integrations with customer identity, data and workflow systems, such as APIs, messaging and streaming, file stores and enterprise data platforms.
• Set up deployment automation and dev, test and prod parity using containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD and logging and metrics.
• Own performance, reliability and operational readiness for mission workloads, covering observability, scaling, cost and performance tradeoffs and failure planning.
• Work with security and accreditation staff on an RMF/ATO-ready approach, supplying documentation inputs, deployment patterns and control considerations.
• Keep demos, PoVs and production deployments realistic for classified and air-gapped environments and for long-term sustainment.
• Deliver handoff packages including architecture diagrams, deployment guides, runbooks, IaC or configuration files and code repositories where appropriate.
• Run knowledge transfer and enablement sessions for customer and partner engineers, operators and sustainment teams.
• Agree acceptance criteria with stakeholders and reach a documented production sign-off or a clear transition plan at the end of each engagement.
• Coordinate with systems integrators and partners to keep work continuous from PoV to production, including roles, interfaces and escalation paths.
• Work with Sales and Capture on technical win strategy, customer objections and bid or no-bid decisions, including delivery and technical risk.
• Contribute to proposals and technical responses covering architecture, integration approach, security posture and implementation plan.
• Turn structured feedback from engagements into product requirements, prioritizing gaps that affect several customers.
• Work with Engineering and Product on packaging, documentation, deployment automation and connectors that reduce delivery friction.
• Days 0-45: Gain hands-on mastery of the platform, including core capabilities, APIs and SDKs, deployment patterns and differentiators.
• Days 0-45: Build a repeatable demo and PoV environment using containers, Kubernetes, configurations, datasets and scripts that runs reliably on laptops and in constrained environments.
• Days 0-45: Create a PoV-to-production starter kit with a reference repository structure, baseline CI/CD, logging and metrics standards and handoff documentation templates.
• Days 0-45: Shadow priority accounts to learn target missions, typical data sources and stakeholder dynamics, and identify 2 to 3 high-value PoV use cases.
• Days 46-120: Lead discovery and deliver tailored demos for priority accounts, owning at least 1 to 2 PoV engagements end to end.
• Days 46-120: Turn at least one PoV into a production implementation or production-ready pilot with deployment automation, observability and a security posture that fits the target environment.
• Days 46-120: Set up a repeatable handoff process with a partner or customer team, covering documentation, enablement sessions and acceptance criteria.
• Days 46-120: Work with Sales and Capture to shape active pursuits with clear technical win themes and delivery risk plans.
• Days 121-180: Build repeatable playbooks for discovery, PoV scoping, demo flows, production hardening and handoff and enablement kits.
• Days 121-180: Cut time to demo and time to production by standardizing reference architectures and deployment patterns across cloud, core data centers and edge.
• Days 121-180: Enable at least one partner or customer team to deploy and run a platform-based solution on its own, using your handoff materials and training.
• Days 121-180: Send structured field feedback that shapes roadmap items on federal deployment, security, integration and delivery speed.

Requirements

• Have 6+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, Forward-Deployed Engineer or Delivery Engineer, supporting U.S. federal customers.
• Have led end-to-end engagements, from discovery and technical validation through PoV or pilot, production implementation and handoff to a customer or partner.
• Be comfortable working in sensitive mission settings and communicating within security and information-handling limits.
• Build and harden applications quickly, with strong software engineering skills. Python is strongly preferred. Experience with APIs, SDKs and modern web or app frameworks is needed.
• Have working knowledge of LLMs and GenAI systems, RAG and retrieval, embeddings and vector search, agentic workflows and evaluation and guardrails.
• Understand distributed systems and integration patterns, including APIs, event-driven or streaming systems and data pipelines.
• Have experience with containerized deployments and DevOps practices such as Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and logging and metrics. Familiarity with infrastructure as code is a plus.
• Translate technical capability into mission impact and customer value for both executive and practitioner audiences.
• Be a strong storyteller and workshop facilitator, skilled at whiteboarding, driving technical decisions and handling objections in real time.
• Show high ownership and a bias to act, driving outcomes with little supervision while coordinating across Sales, Product, Engineering and partners.
• U.S. citizenship is required.
• Active TS/SCI clearance is required.
• Must be able to travel within the continental U.S., including to customer sites and secure locations as needed.
• Preferred: Experience supporting DoD or IC deployments in classified, air-gapped or DDIL environments, with familiarity with RMF/ATO processes and NIST 800-53 control families.
• Preferred: Experience delivering production implementations with clear operational ownership, including runbooks, monitoring, incident response and sustainment handoffs.
• Preferred: Experience building integrations with common federal data platforms, streaming systems and identity or access systems.
• Preferred: Prior military service or direct experience supporting operational mission teams.
• Preferred: Published demos, open-source contributions or past work building reference solutions for developer platforms.

Conditions

This is a remote role based in Colorado, and you can work from anywhere with the tools and support you need.

The base salary is between $170,000 and $210,000, plus equity and benefits. Final pay depends on experience, impact and location.

Travel within the continental U.S. is required as the role demands.

The company is an equal opportunity employer.

Benefits

• Equity in a high-potential, well-funded startup.
• Health coverage with low-deductible medical plans.
• Support for a remote workspace.
• Flexible time off and supportive family leave policies.