Defense Unicorns
Forward Deployed AI Engineer
Why it's interesting
Fully remote defense FDE work at $149K–$201K — roughly half what SF AI labs pay for the same job title — and the JD goes out of its way to say "this is not an ML research position." The differentiator isn't model skill, it's shipping RAG into air-gapped Kubernetes, which is a genuinely scarcer competence than the comp band implies.
The role
Forward Deployed AI Engineer at Defense Unicorns, builders of the Unified Defense Stack for U.S. defense and national security customers. Embed with strategic customers from problem discovery to production; build APIs, data pipelines, retrieval and RAG systems; deploy across cloud, on-prem and air-gapped environments. 4+ years backend/full-stack in Python, information-retrieval experience, U.S. citizenship and clearance eligibility required. Up to 25% travel. Remote, USA. $148,750–$201,250. Verified on Defense Unicorns' Greenhouse board.
Applications go directly to the company. We curate; we don't broker.