Forward Deployed Engineer

Summary

Capitol AI builds sovereign intelligence infrastructure for the world's most consequential institutions. A wrong answer here carries regulatory, financial, or national security weight. The platform deploys entirely within customer-controlled environments, transforming proprietary data into auditable, repeatable, decision-grade artifacts with no data egress and full traceability.

Founded in Washington D.C. and backed by Y Combinator, Capitol operates at the intersection of policy, finance, and technology. Our U.S. clients span federal agencies, financial institutions, and global professional services firms: environments where precision, discretion, and institutional trust are the baseline, not the benchmark.

This Forward Deployed Engineer role is the technical and strategic presence at the point of deployment. You are the person who makes Capitol's infrastructure work inside some of the most demanding and consequential environments in the country.

The Role:

You will own the full deployment lifecycle: from technical integration and workflow configuration through stakeholder enablement and ongoing production support. You will work directly with analysts, compliance teams, procurement leads, and senior executives across federal agencies, financial institutions, and professional services firms. Some client environments will involve classified or sensitive data handling, and you will be expected to operate with the appropriate levels of rigor and discretion.

Responsibilities:

• Partner with enterprise clients to understand their data landscape, business objectives, and technical constraints, translating institutional requirements into governed, production-grade AI deployments.
• Design and deploy agentic AI applications that integrate Capitol's core platform into customer systems and mission-critical workflows, including secure and classified environments.
• Build connectors, data pipelines, and custom integrations that enable proprietary data to flow securely and efficiently within customer-controlled infrastructure.
• Prototype and deliver new use cases leveraging large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and multi-agent orchestration, configured to institutional standards.
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor across pilots, integrations, and scaled production deployments, navigating complex stakeholder environments with composure and credibility.
• Collaborate with Capitol's product and engineering teams to surface frontline client insights that shape roadmap priorities and implementation frameworks.
• Contribute to reusable implementation playbooks, documentation, and best practices that accelerate deployment across U.S. and allied-nation client accounts.

Preferred Qualifications

• 3 to 7+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or applied ML, ideally in a customer-facing, consulting, or deployment capacity.
• Proficiency in Python, TypeScript, or equivalent; hands-on experience with APIs, cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and data processing pipelines.
• Direct experience deploying AI technologies including LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, and vector databases within complex enterprise environments.
• Demonstrable ability to work directly with enterprise clients, including C-suite, technical leads, and procurement or compliance stakeholders.
• Comfortable operating autonomously in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where the deployment playbook is still being written.
• Familiarity with regulated or sensitive data environments in financial services, public sector, or defense, and the governance requirements that accompany them.
• Bonus: prior experience at an AI, data, or B2B SaaS company, or as a solutions engineer or implementation specialist.

Security Clearance

Active clearance at Secret level or above is a significant advantage, particularly for federal and defense-facing deployments, and will determine the scope of environments you are eligible to support. Candidates without existing clearance are welcome to apply. The right profile and eligibility matter more than current status, and sponsorship pathways exist for suitable candidates. Candidates must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents eligible for clearance.

Strongly Valued

• Prior experience working within or alongside federal agencies, DoD, intelligence community, DHS, or equivalent government bodies.
• Familiarity with NIPRNet, SIPRNet, or equivalent classified network environments and the deployment constraints they impose.
• Background in financial services, investment management, regulatory compliance, or policy intelligence: you understand the decisions our clients are making.
• Experience working with or within global professional services firms (Big Four, strategy consultancies, legal) on technology deployment engagements.
• Familiarity with FedRAMP, FISMA, ITAR, or other U.S. federal compliance and data governance frameworks.
• Experience with multimodal content generation, document processing, or structured report production at scale.

What We Offer

• A front-row seat at the deployment frontier of sovereign AI infrastructure: work that matters, in environments where it shows.
• Direct collaboration with Capitol's founding team and core engineering organization, with significant influence over U.S. go-to-market execution.
• Meaningful equity participation in a Y Combinator-backed company
• Hybrid and remote-flexible working, with the expectation of regular client-site presence across the U.S.
• The opportunity to define implementation standards and deployment practices for one of the fastest-growing enterprise AI platforms serving Western sovereign institutions.