Senior Forward Deployed Engineer

Acceler8 Talent; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Meaningful equity

Job summary

Acceler8 Talent partners with an early-stage defense AI company to build technology for detecting and conducting AI-powered cyber operations. This role demands high ownership: work directly with customers, define real needs, and deliver end-to-end software in a small, senior team.

You’ll own discovery, design, implementation, deployment, and post-launch validation, collaborating across product, frontend, backend, and infrastructure to ship production-ready solutions.

Qualifications

• Evidence of delivering finished software used by customers or demanding internal stakeholders.
• Strong full-stack engineering ability and confidence to build substantial software.
• Experience owning ambiguous requirements without a detailed spec or PM translation.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with customers to understand and refine requirements.
• Determine true customer needs, not just initial requests.
• Design and build full-stack solutions from scratch when needed.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

Customer-facing communication

Ambiguity ownership

Fast execution

Independent decision making

Job description

I’m working with an early-stage defense AI company building technology to detect and conduct a novel class of AI-powered cyber operation.

This is not conventional vulnerability research or zero-day hunting. The company is tackling a less-understood attack surface where the US currently lacks reliable detection and comparable operational capability.

The business is already revenue-generating, has more than 18 months of runway and is deliberately building a very small, senior technical team.

This is a high-ownership customer engineering opportunity for someone who can sit directly with users, work out what they actually need, then personally build and ship the solution end to end.

You’ll work on:

• Working directly with customers and users to understand ambiguous or poorly defined requirements
• Figuring out what the customer actually needs rather than simply building what they initially ask for
• Designing and building full-stack software solutions from scratch where required
• Owning the full loop from discovery and solution design through implementation, deployment and post-launch validation
• Configuring existing product capabilities while also writing new code where the problem requires it
• Using customer feedback, adoption and real-world usage to determine whether the solution actually worked
• Moving quickly across product, frontend, backend and infrastructure without waiting for handoffs from PMs or separate implementation teams

Requirements:

• Evidence of personally delivering finished software used by real customers, users or demanding internal stakeholders
• Strong full-stack engineering ability and the confidence to build substantial software rather than simply demo or configure products
• Experience owning ambiguous requirements without needing a detailed spec, roadmap or PM translation layer
• Ability to clearly explain what the customer asked for, what they actually needed, what you personally built and what happened after launch
• Strong communication and people skills, with the ability to build trust directly with technical and non-technical users
• Clear personal ownership of solution design, implementation and delivery—not simply contributing tickets within a larger team
• High agency, strong technical judgement and the ability to move quickly with incomplete information
• Experience in forward deployed engineering, GTM engineering, product engineering, consultancy, agency work, freelancing or early-stage startups is highly valuable.

You’ll join a very small technical team working on difficult national-security problems involving large-scale multimodal data, signal extraction, applied ML and agentic systems.

The environment is highly hands-on and deliberately low on bureaucracy. Engineers are expected to make decisions independently, communicate directly with users and take responsibility for getting working software into production.

Package:

Competitive base salary plus meaningful equity.