Forward Deployed Engineer

Location
Los Angeles, San Francisco +2
Workplace
On-site
Compensation
$180k – $250k + equity
Visa
No Visa Sponsorship

About this role

Aslan builds AI for the people who protect this country. The work matters. The stakes are not abstract.

You’ll deploy Aslan’s platform into high-consequence environments across the U.S. national security community — intelligence, defense, and law enforcement. You own the full arc: scoping, integration, live operation, and customer trust, in settings where ambiguity is the default and the margin for error is thin.

But you are not a band-aid. You are not patching things in the field and handing them back. You are a core engineer who also happens to thrive at the point of contact — someone who ships production code during the week and deploys it into a SCIF on Friday. The expectation is that you contribute meaningfully to the

codebase, not just operate on top of it.

What you'll do

Contribute directly to Aslan’s core platform, writing production code, building features, and extending agent capabilities alongside the engineering team

Deploy and operate agentic AI systems in sensitive government and defense environments, carrying full technical ownership from integration through live operation

Serve as the primary technical interface to mission owners and operators, learning their workflows, constraints, and language before they have to explain them twice

Build rapid prototypes, custom integrations, and field-expedient solutions in hours, not sprints and then bring the best of those back into the core product

Translate field requirements and edge cases back to the engineering team with precision, urgency, and working code

Operate independently at customer sites with minimal oversight -- no one is going to hold your hand and no one is going to tell you what to build

Stand up and maintain field infrastructure across heterogeneous hardware and networking environments using whatever works

Conduct live demonstrations to senior government and military stakeholders where failure is not a learning opportunity, it’s just failure

What happens next

Skip the application pile. I get you in front of the people who decide.

Confirm the fit

A few questions to make sure this role is the right shape for you. Two minutes.

I pitch you to the company

I write the intro, send it to the founder, and handle the back-and-forth.

A meeting lands on your calendar

When the company wants to meet, I get the call on your calendar. You just show up.

Culture & values

Company has co-founder leadership structure with CEO and CTO roles

Organization focuses on mission-driven work related to public safety and threat prevention

Know someone who'd be great for this?