AI Forward Deployed Engineer
Gabriel Talent
About the Company
A seed-stage company based in Washington, DC, building AI to systematically dismantle fraud, waste, and abuse in the US government. The product is an agentic AI platform that ingests public and government-restricted data sources, reasons across them, and surfaces specific fraud cases with the evidence chain that lets government auditors act. The company is currently focused on Medicare and Medicaid fraud, an addressable problem estimated at roughly $500 billion annually.
The founding team has already identified a substantial amount of previously unidentified fraud across several agencies, and has active conversations underway with major federal health and defense agencies along with multiple state and local governments. The company has closed one funding round and has a high-powered board and real political tailwinds behind its mission. The central bottleneck right now is engineering headcount, government contracts of meaningful size won't go to a company this small, so the team has to staff up first.
About the Role
This is one of the company's first cohort of Forward Deployed Engineers, a role spanning applied AI research and production systems with direct partner-facing responsibility inside US Government environments. There are two tracks under this same role:
- Non-civilian agency team: works with defense and national security agencies. US citizenship is required, no exceptions, with on-site work at a federal facility a few times a week and sponsorship available for a Top Secret clearance. Existing clearance is a strong accelerator.
- Civilian agency team: works with federal health agencies and state and local governments. US citizens are preferred but not required, exceptional candidates on an O-1 visa are on the table.
What You'll Own
- Architecting and shipping agentic AI systems for high-stakes US government missions, from proof of concept through production
- Designing and integrating LLM-based applications: multi-agent frameworks, tool-calling agents, RAG pipelines, and human-in-the-loop autonomy workflows
- Embedding directly with government partners in operational environments
- Building and scaling data curation and evaluation pipelines for model training and iteration
- Owning the full system lifecycle: discovery, architecture, deployment, security, reliability, and continuous improvement
What We're Looking For
- 1 to 4 years of production engineering experience, with real, demonstrated end-to-end delivery
- Strong Python engineering fundamentals, not vibe-coding
- Hands-on experience with LLMs and building agentic systems: RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, multi-agent frameworks, context management
- A track record designing or managing data pipelines and ML infrastructure
- Excellent verbal communication, you'll be expected to represent the company at a high caliber directly with non-technical government stakeholders
- Available to start as soon as possible, in-person 5 days a week at the DC office
- Bonus: an active US security clearance, prior work on US government, defense, or intelligence programs, prior work on healthcare fraud analytics or public-sector data, or founding/founding-engineer experience at another startup
Logistics
Washington, DC, in-person five days a week. Compensation is $150K to $250K plus 0.5% to 1% equity. Relocation support is available.