Forward Deployed Engineer - US National Security

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at TRM Labs, you will work directly with TRM's national-security customers, deploying the platform into their environments, sitting with mission users, and building what they actually need. This is a generalist engineering role where in a given quarter you might ship application code, debug a Kubernetes workload in a restricted environment, design a data schema, stand up cloud infrastructure, or prototype an entirely new capability. You will often be the only TRM engineer in the room, and what you build enables government customers to use TRM securely in the most demanding environments.

What you'll do

• Deploy, integrate and operate TRM's platform inside customer environments (cloud and air-gapped) and own the outcome end to end
• Sit directly with mission users, translate what they need into working software, and build integrations, data pipelines, and prototypes that prove out capabilities
• Deliver across whatever the problem requires: application code, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, databases, and data flow, rather than staying inside one specialty
• Act as the technical bridge back to TRM's product and engineering teams, carrying mission context into the roadmap
• Diagnose and resolve hard problems in constrained environments with limited tooling and limited outside help
• Identify and diagnose critical on-site issues, open incident channels with the remote team, and land fixes in minutes to hours
• Anticipate customer-side delays by building relationships with stakeholders, finding bottlenecks, and securing approval efficiently
• Keep documentation current and flag anything that threatens a milestone within 24 hours so the remote team is never surprised

What you bring

• Strong programming ability in Python and/or Node.js/TypeScript, with real fluency developing with AI: coding agents and LLM tooling are part of how you ship
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience: deploying, debugging, and reasoning about real workloads
• Production AWS experience building environments, not just consuming them
• Working fluency with relational databases such as PostgreSQL: schema design, query tuning, and safely moving data
• Concrete examples of delivering outside your primary specialty, such as learning a new language, datastore, or platform because the project needed it
• Outstanding written and verbal communication; comfort being the only engineer in front of a customer regularly is not optional

Nice to have

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GitOps (Argo CD)
• Data engineering at scale: orchestration, streaming, columnar/analytics stores
• Distributed systems design and debugging
• Building machine learning or agentic systems
• Deep Linux/Unix and networking, especially in restricted or disconnected environments
• Prior delivery inside classified or otherwise regulated government environments

What we offer

• Participation in in-person R&D work weeks, typically 1-2 times per quarter at a TRM hub or designated location, with as little as 14 days' notice
• TRM coordinates and covers approved travel, lodging, and workspace; accommodations available for caregiving, health, immigration, and similar constraints
• Small, senior, and high-trust team where everyone owns a real surface end to end
• Weekly team syncs plus project check-ins; tracking current in Linear and raising problems the moment they arise
• Alignment to US-eastern hours with both on-site and remote flexibility, communicating across multiple channels including high-side chat, high-side and low-side email, Slack, phone, Signal, and Google Meet

About TRM Labs

TRM Labs provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime. TRM is a Series C company with $220M in total funding, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, Thoma Bravo, and others. Headquartered in San Francisco, TRM operates as a distributed-first company with hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore.