Sr Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), AWS Forward Deployed Engineering, US Government

Application deadline: Nov 1, 2026

This position requires that the candidate selected be a US Citizen and currently possess and maintain an active Top Secret security clearance with SCI eligibility or higher.

A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds directly inside a strategic enterprise customer to design, build, deploy, and run AI-powered production systems alongside the customer's engineering team. FDEs write production-grade software and own outcomes end-to-end, from prototype through enterprise-scale deployment, combining the technical rigor of an AWS SDE with the urgency and ownership required to deliver measurable customer business outcomes. They create reusable architectures, patterns, and engineering mechanisms that scale the entire FDE practice. This position requires that the candidate selected be a US Citizen and currently possess and maintain an active US Government Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility (or higher).

Key job responsibilities
- Lead technical delivery across customer engagements. Own the technical strategy and execution for complex, multi-workstream customer AI programs. Make architecture decisions that span multiple services and organizational boundaries. Align technical approach with the customer's long-term technology strategy. Requires up to 25% travel.
- Architect and build production AI systems at scale: multi-agent orchestration, enterprise retrieval systems, and decision intelligence platforms for the most complex engagements. Drive clarity where neither the business problem nor the technology approach is fully defined. Build production systems that handle enterprise-scale traffic and reliability requirements.
- Own production excellence across workstreams. Define operational standards, evaluation frameworks, and production-readiness criteria for AI systems. Establish mechanisms (testing strategies, observability standards, incident-response playbooks) that keep AI systems healthy.
- Scale the team's effectiveness. Define engineering patterns, contribute to the interview and hiring process, and mentor junior FDEs into independent contributors.
- Accelerate customer transformation. Identify systemic opportunities to expand AI adoption, create reusable accelerators that cut time-to-value from months to weeks, and feed learnings back into AWS services and the FDE practice.

A day in the life
A Senior FDE spends the day leading technical delivery inside the customer's environment: setting the architecture direction across workstreams, building alongside customer engineers on the hardest production AI problems, reviewing designs and code, and mentoring FDEs into independent contributors.

About the team
ABOUT AWS:

Diverse Experiences
Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying.

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