Senior FDE - AI for Government (TS/SCI)

Amazon Inc.; Herndon (VA); On-site; USD 168,000 - 227,000; Full time

Job summary

Amazon is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to embed with a strategic enterprise customer, delivering AI-powered production systems end-to-end. You will design, implement, and operate scalable architectures across multi-workstream programs, mentoring junior engineers and shaping the FDE practice.

The role requires US citizenship with active Top Secret clearance and SCI eligibility, plus experience leading production AI solutions, using AWS services, and collaborating with customer teams

Qualifications

• 5+ years of non‑internship professional software development experience.
• 5+ years of programming with at least one software programming language experience.
• 5+ years of leading design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems experience.
• Experience as a mentor, tech lead or leading an engineering team.
• Active US Government Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility (or higher).
• Experience leading agentic and spec‑driven development at production scale (developing AI agents a plus).
• Experience with AI tools: eval frameworks, agent tooling, RAG pipelines, and prompt engineering.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical delivery across customer engagements. Own the technical strategy and execution for complex, multi-workstream customer AI programs. Make architecture decisions that span multiple services and organizational boundaries.
• Architect and build production AI systems at scale: multi-agent orchestration, enterprise retrieval systems, and decision intelligence platforms for the most complex engagements.
• Own production excellence across workstreams. Define operational standards, evaluation frameworks, and production-readiness criteria for AI systems.
• Scale the team's effectiveness. Define engineering patterns, contribute to the interview and hiring process, and mentor junior FDEs into independent contributors.
• Accelerate customer transformation. Identify systemic opportunities to expand AI adoption, create reusable accelerators that cut time-to-value from months to weeks.

Skills

Software development

Programming languages

Design leadership

Mentorship

Top Secret clearance

AI tools

AI agents

Production AI systems

AWS services

React/TypeScript

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or equivalent

Tools

AWS services

Python

Go

React

TypeScript

Job description

Amazon is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to embed with a strategic enterprise customer, delivering AI-powered production systems end-to-end. You will design, implement, and operate scalable architectures across multi-workstream programs, mentoring junior engineers and shaping the FDE practice.

The role requires US citizenship with active Top Secret clearance and SCI eligibility, plus experience leading production AI solutions, using AWS services, and collaborating with customer teams