About the Role
Lexor is hiring its first cohort of Forward Deployed Engineers, split roughly 50/50 between two teams.
This is a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) position spanning applied AI research and production systems, with direct partner-facing responsibilities to ensure operational success inside US Government partner environments.
Two teams under the same role framing:
Team 1 — Black-Box / Top-Secret Team: Works on non-civilian agencies (Department of War, Homeland Security). US citizens only, non-negotiable. Engineers on this team will work on-site at the Pentagon 2–3 times per week and will be sponsored for TS clearance. Existing TS clearance is a strong plus and a real acceleration.
Team 2 — Civilian Agency Team: Works with CMS, HHS, state and local governments. US citizens preferred but not required (O-1 candidates are on the table).
The mandate:
Architect and ship agent AI systems for high-stakes US Government missions, from proof-of-concept through production.
Design and integrate LLM-based applications — multi-agent frameworks, tool-calling agents, RAG pipelines, human-in-the-loop autonomy workflows.
Embed directly with government partners in operational environments.
Build and scale data curation and evaluation pipelines for model training and iteration.
Develop and maintain infrastructure supporting model inference, experimentation, evaluation, and deployment on frontier AI platforms.
Turn mission-relevant data, models, and tooling into real operational autonomy capabilities.
Own the full system lifecycle — discovery, architecture, deployment, security, reliability, continuous improvement.
Engineers are expected to be proficient at expressing technical ideas clearly to non-technical government stakeholders and to represent Lexor at a high caliber.
Requirements
1–4 years of production engineering experience.
Strong Python engineering background with demonstrated end-to-end delivery.
Hands-on experience with LLMs and building agentic systems — RAG pipelines, tool-calling agents, multi-agent frameworks, context management, agentic engineering.
Real deep technical knowledge, not vibe-coding.
Track record designing or managing data pipelines and ML infrastructure.
Excellent verbal communicator.
In-person 5 days/week at DC office.
US citizen for the top-secret team (non-negotiable); US citizen preferred for the civilian team, O-1 candidates on the table for exceptional profiles.
Available to start ASAP.
Profile Tiers:
Tier 1 — Ex-Founders / Ex-Founding Engineers of AI Startups (ex-YC founders, Neo Scholars, Z Fellows, South Park Commons, Pioneer, a16z Speedrun alumni).
Tier 2 — Forward Deployed / Applied Engineers at Defense-Adjacent (Palantir Foundry FDE, Anduril, Shield AI, Rebellion Defense, Vannevar Labs, HavocAI, Scale AI Federal, Skyryse, Applied Intuition).
Tier 3 — Applied Engineers at Agentic AI / LLM Companies (Sierra, Decagon, Glean, Cresta, Rox, Parloa, OpenAI Solutions, Anthropic Applied, Perplexity Applied, Cursor Applied, Cognition (Devin) Applied, Together AI, Fireworks AI, Modal, Replicate).
Tier 4 — US Digital Service, 18F, or White House Presidential Innovation Fellows.
Tier 5 — Big Tech with Zero-to-One Signal (narrow).
