Mission Delivery Engineer - Remote

OpenKrill; United States; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

This role is not purely presentation or back-office work; it requires building, validating, and operationalizing solutions that meet strict security and data-handling constraints for federal customers.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in customer-facing technical roles supporting U.S. federal customers.
• Demonstrated ability to lead end-to-end engagements: discovery, PoV, production implementation, handoff.
• Comfort operating in sensitive mission contexts and security constraints.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical discovery with DoD/IC and federal customers to define mission use cases and success criteria.
• Design and deliver tailored demos, PoVs, and workshops for executive and practitioner audiences.
• Convert PoVs into production implementations with deployment automation and security posture aligned to customer environments.
• Deliver clear handoffs with architecture diagrams, deployment guides, and runbooks to customers or partners.

Skills

Federal-facing delivery

Solutions engineering

Customer storytelling

Hands-on coding

Tools

Kubernetes

CI/CD

APIs

Job description

MISSION DELIVERY ENGINEER (MDE)

Location: Remote with significant customer-site travel (including secure locations)

ROLE OVERVIEW

Kamiwaza AI is seeking a Mission Delivery Engineer (MDE) to serve as a forward-deployed, hands-on technical leader for U.S. federal customers. You will own the technical journey from pre-sales discovery and proof-of-value (PoV) demos of custom applications on the Kamiwaza platform through production implementation and successful hand-off to the customer or an integration partner.

This role is built for a builder who is also consultative and delivery-minded: you can run discovery, quantify value, tell a compelling technical story, write real code, and then harden what you built so it can operate reliably in mission environments (including constrained, disconnected, or air-gapped deployments).

This is not a pure presentation role and not a back-office engineering role. It is an end-to-end mission delivery role that combines pre-sales technical execution with post-sale implementation, operationalization, enablement, and structured handover.

Core Mission

Accelerate federal adoption of Kamiwaza by translating high-value mission use cases into credible PoVs and demo experiences, and then converting the successful PoVs into production-ready deployments and repeatable delivery patterns that reduce risk, increase win rate, and improve time-to-mission impact.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Mission Discovery, Scoping & Success Planning

• Lead technical discovery with DoD/IC and federal customers: mission workflows, data sources, operating constraints (including DDIL), stakeholders, and success criteria.
• Translate discovery into a clear use case definition, solution outline, and measurable PoV plan (what 'good' looks like, how it will be measured, and what data is required).
• Define a PoV-to-production path upfront: architecture assumptions, integration points, security considerations, and what must be true for production go-live.

Pre-Sales PoV, Demos, Workshops & Rapid Prototyping

• Design and deliver tailored demos, whiteboard sessions, and hands-on workshops for executive and practitioner audiences.
• Build rapid prototypes and custom apps on top of the Kamiwaza platform using real or representative customer data, often under tight timelines.
• Demonstrate mission workflows such as RAG, agentic orchestration, streaming/event-driven ingestion, and edge-capable inference, aligned to customer constraints.
• Instrument PoVs with basic evaluation and guardrails (grounding checks, policy constraints, transparency) to maintain credibility and accelerate stakeholder buy-in.

Production Implementation & Delivery Engineering

• Convert successful PoVs into production implementations: harden code, modularize components, introduce testing, and align with customer engineering standards.
• Design and implement integrations with customer identity, data, and workflow systems (APIs, messaging/streaming, file stores, enterprise data platforms).
• Establish deployment automation and environment parity (dev/test/prod) using containerization and modern DevOps practices (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, logging/metrics).
• Drive performance, reliability, and operational readiness for mission workloads (observability, scaling, cost/performance tradeoffs, and failure-mode planning).

Security, Compliance & Deployment Readiness

• Operate with a security-first mindset: data containment, least privilege, auditability, and safe handling of sensitive customer information.
• Partner with security/accreditation stakeholders to support an RMF/ATO-ready approach (documentation inputs, deployment patterns, and control considerations).
• Ensure demos, PoVs, and production deployments remain credible by aligning with customer environment constraints and sustainment realities (including classified and air-gapped environments).

Handoff, Enablement & Partner Collaboration

• Deliver clear hand-off packages to customers or partners: architecture diagrams, deployment guides, runbooks, IaC/configuration artifacts, and code repositories as appropriate.
• Lead knowledge transfer sessions and enablement workshops for customer and partner engineers, operators, and sustainment teams.
• Define acceptance criteria with stakeholders and drive to a documented production sign-off (or a clear, agreed transition plan) at the end of each engagement.
• Coordinate with systems integrators and partners to ensure continuity from PoV through production, including roles/responsibilities, interfaces, and escalation paths.

Technical Deal Support & Field-to-Product Feedback

• Partner with Sales and Capture to shape technical win strategies, address customer objections, and support bid/no-bid decisions with clear delivery and technical risk assessment.
• Contribute to proposals and technical responses (architecture, integration approach, security posture, and implementation plan).
• Capture structured feedback from engagements and translate it into actionable product requirements, prioritizing gaps that impact multiple customers.
• Partner with Engineering and Product to improve packaging, documentation, deployment automation, and connectors that reduce delivery friction.

First 180 Days - Mandate for Success

Days 0-45: Platform Mastery & Delivery Toolkit

• Achieve deep, hands-on mastery of the Kamiwaza platform (core capabilities, APIs/SDKs, deployment patterns, and differentiators).
• Stand up a repeatable demo/PoV environment (containers/Kubernetes, configs, datasets, scripts) that can run reliably on customer laptops and in constrained environments.
• Create a PoV-to-production starter kit: reference repo structure, baseline CI/CD, logging/metrics standards, and documentation templates for handoff.
• Shadow priority accounts to learn target missions, typical data sources, and stakeholder dynamics; identify 2-3 high-leverage PoV use cases.

Days 46-120: PoV Impact and Production Conversion

• Lead discovery and deliver tailored demos for priority accounts; own at least 1-2 PoV engagements end-to-end.
• Convert at least one PoV into a production implementation or a production-ready pilot (with deployment automation, observability, and security posture aligned to the target environment).
• Establish a repeatable handoff motion with a partner or customer team (documentation, enablement sessions, and acceptance criteria).
• Partner with Sales/Capture to influence active pursuits with clear technical win themes and delivery risk mitigation plans.

Days 121-180: Scale Repeatability and Partner Enablement

• Create repeatable playbooks: discovery checklist, PoV scoping templates, demo flows, production hardening checklist, and handoff/enablement kits.
• Reduce time-to-demo and time-to-production by standardizing reference architectures and deployment patterns across cloud, core data centers, and edge.
• Enable at least one partner or customer team to independently deploy and operate a Kamiwaza-based solution using your handoff materials and training.
• Provide structured field feedback that influences roadmap items tied to federal deployment, security, integration needs, and delivery acceleration.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

Federal Customer-Facing & Delivery Experience

• 6+ years in customer-facing technical roles (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, Forward-Deployed Engineer, Delivery Engineer, or similar) supporting U.S. federal customers.
• Demonstrated ability to lead end-to-end engagements: discovery, technical validation, PoV/pilot, production implementation, and handoff to customer or partner.
• Comfort operating in sensitive mission contexts and communicating clearly within security and information-handling constraints.

Hands-On Technical Depth

• Strong software engineering skills with the ability to build and harden applications rapidly (Python stro