Forward Deployed Engineer - US National Security

As a Forward Deployed Engineer at TRM Labs, you work directly with US national-security customers, deploying TRM's AI-powered intelligence platform into their environments and building what the mission actually needs. This generalist engineering role puts you on-site with users who rely on TRM to investigate and disrupt crime, and you own the outcome across application code, infrastructure, data pipelines, and whatever the problem requires.

What you'll do

• Deploy, integrate, and operate TRM's platform inside customer environments (cloud and air-gapped), owning the outcome end to end
• Sit directly with mission users, translate their needs into working software, and build integrations, data pipelines, and prototypes that prove out capabilities
• Deliver across application code, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, databases, and data flow rather than staying within 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, work with the remote team to land fixes in minutes to hours, and share lessons within 48 hours
• Anticipate customer-side delays by building relationships with stakeholders, finding bottlenecks, and identifying alternative approval paths
• Keep documentation current and flag anything that threatens a milestone within 24 hours

What you bring

• Strong programming ability in Python and/or Node.js/TypeScript, with real fluency developing with AI such as coding agents and LLM tooling
• Hands-on Kubernetes experience: deploying, debugging, and reasoning about real workloads
• Production AWS experience, building environments rather than just consuming them
• Working fluency with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, including schema design, query tuning, and data movement
• Concrete examples of delivering outside your primary specialty, picking up new languages, datastores, or platforms because the project needed them
• Outstanding written and verbal communication, with comfort being the only engineer in front of a customer regularly
• AI fluency: you are among the top 10 percent of operators in your function in how you apply AI to accelerate workflows, structure problems, improve output quality, and increase speed and leverage

Nice to have

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform) and GitOps (Argo CD)
• Data engineering at scale, including orchestration, streaming, and 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

About TRM Labs

TRM Labs is a Series C company with $220M in total funding, backed by Goldman Sachs, Bessemer, Y Combinator, and Thoma Bravo. Headquartered in San Francisco and operating as distributed-first, TRM has hubs in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., London, and Singapore. TRM provides AI-powered intelligence solutions that help public and private sector agencies investigate and disrupt crime, enabling investigators to trace illicit activity and construct operating pictures of threat networks.