Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Public Sector

At Scale, we build the AI systems behind some of the country's most important decisions. On the Public Sector Engineering team, you'll embed directly with U.S. government customers, including the Army, Air Force, Joint commands and Intelligence Community, to build and deploy AI applications that support their most critical missions.

This is a hybrid customer-facing engineering role. You'll sit with the people whose problems you're solving, own delivery from first prototype to production, and ship software that customers adopt and rely on in the field. Model performance matters, timelines are urgent, and ambiguity is the norm. Your work directly shapes what Scale's platform can do for the public sector.

What you'll do

• Embed with government customers to understand their mission, scope the problem, and turn it into working software.
• Own delivery end-to-end: design, build, deploy, and maintain solutions at customer sites, from prototype to stable production.
• Build robust backend systems and data integrations that connect customer environments to Scale's platform and back.
• Partner with product and engineering to feed field signals back into the roadmap, so the patterns you build once become capabilities the whole team can reuse.
• Serve as the technical point of contact for customer stakeholders, guiding adoption and maximizing mission impact.

What we're looking for

Required

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in customer-facing, forward-deployed, or government contexts.
• Strong production coding in Python and TypeScript (or comparable modern languages).
• Comfort across the stack, including cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), containers, Linux, and networking fundamentals.
• Ability to operate independently in ambiguous, fast-moving environments and make sound trade-offs under pressure.
• An active TS/SCI clearance, or eligibility to obtain one.

Bonus

• Experience building or deploying systems powered by LLMs or generative models.
• Familiarity with Node and React, Kubernetes and Docker, and Terraform.
• Data engineering background covering ETL pipelines, data modeling, and data governance.

Location and travel

This role requires significant time on-site with customers. Expect 25% travel with up to 50% travel as necessary, and/or relocation to Washington DC or St. Louis.