Missionforce - Senior/Lead Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Public Sector

Salesforce · Herndon, Virginia

Must be a U.S. citizen (U.S. born or naturalized) living on U.S. soil who does not hold dual citizenship with the ability to meet customer and government screening standards applicable to this role. ​

Candidates interested in the Hawaii location must be based in Oahu.

PLEASE NOTE: Qualification for this job is contingent upon acceptable results from a background investigation as well as your having and maintaining the specific level of U.S. government background investigation and clearance required for this role.

About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) on our Public Sector team, you'll be embedded with U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and Aerospace clients — designing and deploying bespoke AI solutions that drive mission-critical outcomes. Additionally you'll architect the backbone of a planet-scale platform that ships hundreds of features daily with rock-solid reliability and security.

This role demand a builder's mindset, an AI-first approach, and the technical depth to take complex challenges from concept to production.

Mission Responsibilities

  • Serve as the technical lead on high-profile customer engagements—designing, building, and deploying tailored Salesforce solutions for defense, intelligence, and aerospace missions.
  • Engineer distributed systems running across thousands of compute nodes on AWS, GCP, Azure, or Alibaba Cloud
  • Develop Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform), microservices (Kubernetes, Docker), and data pipelines
  • Build and ship high-quality, production-grade software using modern engineering practices, with AI as a core part of your development workflow by pushing the boundaries of AI development tools to deliver secure, optimized, and high-quality code.
  • Design and orchestrate complex systems where AI agents integrate seamlessly into human workflows, driving efficiency and innovation at scale.
  • Contribute to building and maintaining the shared system context, an explicit repository of system designs, constraints, and standards that enables AI to operate accurately and reliably.
  • Critically evaluate code (human or AI-generated) for correctness, quality, security, and performance.
  • Partner directly with customers and mission stakeholders to translate complex needs into technical solutions
  • Lead rapid prototyping, root cause analysis, and best-practice evangelism across teams
  • Mentor junior engineers and serve as a technical role model

What We're Looking For

We’re looking for a builder, a problem solver, and a mission-first Leader with a passion for public service. The ideal candidate brings:

  • 8+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
  • Deep proficiency in Java, GoLang, Python, or Ruby
  • A demonstrated, genuine AI-first approach to engineering — using AI to move faster, build fluency across the stack, and contribute well beyond your core specialty.
  • Experience using AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Cursor, etc.) in development workflows.
  • Advanced prompt engineering skills and the ability to write precise, structured prompts and cultivate the system context that makes AI outputs reliable, secure, and production-ready.
  • Experience with enterprise data platforms (Salesforce Data Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery)
  • Experience working in an air-gapped GovCloud environment
  • Strong collaboration and communication skills — from command centers to executive briefings
  • Ability to travel 25–50% of the time, as needed to customer sites.
  • Active Secret or Top Secret clearance required

Preferred

  • Background in defense/aerospace, classified environments (IL5/IL6), or federal civilian agencies
  • Prior experience in a customer-facing, hands-on technical lead or architect role.
  • Salesforce platform experience (Agentforce, Data Cloud, Flows, LWC, Apex)
  • Familiarity with IL5/IL6/CNSS #1253 requirements or deployment to classified environments.

#LI-Y

Apply →