Missionforce - Senior/lead Forward Deployed Engineer (fde), Public Sector

Salesforce Salesforce · Enterprise · Herndon, Hawaii, VA · Remote

Senior/Lead Forward Deployed Engineer on the Public Sector team, embedded with U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Aerospace clients to design and deploy bespoke AI solutions. This role involves architecting a planet-scale platform, engineering distributed systems, developing Infrastructure-as-Code, microservices, and data pipelines, and building production-grade software with AI as a core part of the development workflow. The engineer will design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate into human workflows, contribute to shared system context for AI reliability, and critically evaluate code (human or AI-generated).

What you'd actually do

  1. Serve as the technical lead on high-profile customer engagements—designing, building, and deploying tailored Salesforce solutions for defense, intelligence, and aerospace missions.
  2. Engineer distributed systems running across thousands of compute nodes on AWS, GCP, Azure, or Alibaba Cloud
  3. Develop Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), microservices (Kubernetes, Docker), and data pipelines
  4. Build and ship high-quality, production-grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow by pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high-quality code.
  5. Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.

Skills

Required

  • 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
  • Deep proficiency in Java, GoLang, Python, or Ruby
  • A demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering
  • Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows.
  • Advanced prompt engineering skills
  • Experience with enterprise data platforms (Salesforce Data Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery)
  • Experience working in an air-gapped GovCloud environment
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills
  • Ability to travel 25–50% of the time, as needed to customer sites.
  • Active Secret or Top Secret clearance required

Nice to have

  • Background in defense/aerospace, classified environments (IL5/IL6), or federal civilian agencies
  • Prior experience in a customer-facing, hands-on technical lead or architect role.
  • Salesforce platform experience (Agentforce, Data Cloud, Flows, LWC, Apex)
  • Familiarity with IL5/IL6/CNSS #1253 requirements or deployment to classified environments.

What the JD emphasized

  • Must be a U.S. citizen (U.S. born or naturalized) living on U.S. soil who does not hold dual citizenship with the ability to meet customer and government screening standards applicable to this role.
  • Active Secret or Top Secret clearance required

Other signals

  • AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows
  • AI as a core part of your development workflow
  • Critically evaluate code (human or AI-generated)