Forward Deployed Software Engineer – Tactical Edge AI

About the role

What if your AI had no cloud, limited compute—and no room to fail?

We’re partnering with Palantir to find exceptional Software Engineers for a newly formed team building advanced AI systems for the tactical edge.

You’ll develop LLM agents that run directly on constrained hardware in high-stakes environments—connecting AI with sensors, autonomous platforms, drones and other mission-critical systems.

This is not another chatbot or conventional cloud application. It’s a rare opportunity to define how intelligent agents operate beyond the cloud, where reliability, security and performance have real-world consequences.

The two things you must bring

This role requires a clear, demonstrable spike in:

Building LLM or AI-agent systems, ideally agents designed to run on edge, embedded or compute-constrained hardware.

Hands-on development of complex, mission-critical software, with an exceptionally high bar for reliability, security, performance, testing and fail-safe operation.

We’re looking for someone who has personally built and shipped technically demanding systems—not simply researched, managed or integrated off-the-shelf AI tools.

What you’ll build

Train and fine-tune edge-capable LLMs for tactical applications

Build agentic and multi-agent systems for complex mission scenarios

Optimise models for GPUs, CPUs and specialised accelerators

Deploy AI on embedded and compute-constrained hardware

Connect LLM agents with sensors, effectors, radars and drone systems

Benchmark model capability, latency, reliability and resource consumption

Design secure, scalable and fail-safe production systems

Work directly with defence customers to deploy systems in the field

Test how your software behaves under pressure, including degraded connectivity and limited resources

You won’t be building something that disappears into a roadmap. You’ll see your work operate in real environments.

What else you’ll bring

You’re likely to have around 5–10 years of professional software engineering experience, including:

Strong proficiency in Python, C++ and/or Rust

Experience developing, training or fine-tuning AI models

Hands-on experience with direct LLM APIs or frameworks such as PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain or vLLM

Experience contributing to software architecture and system design

A strong understanding of production reliability, security and testing

Customer-facing or cross-functional experience

A bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics or a related quantitative field

Experience with embedded hardware, robotics, drones, aerospace, defence technology or applied AI research would be highly valuable. Familiarity with Ollama, Mojo, TVM, TensorFlow Lite or other edge-optimisation technologies would also be advantageous.

Why Palantir?

You’ll join a rapidly growing team working at the bleeding edge of AI, autonomous systems and defence.

You’ll have serious technical resources behind you, direct access to important customers and the opportunity to deploy what you build in the field.

The hiring manager describes this as the most exciting work of his career—and believes it may be the most exciting work the people joining this team will do in theirs.

For the right engineer, this is a genuinely career-defining opportunity.

The details

Location: Seattle, Washington

Working model: Hybrid

Relocation: You must live in Seattle or be willing to relocate

Travel: Up to 25%

Salary: $145,000–$275,000 USD

Equity: RSUs

Employment: Full-time

Positions available: 1–2

Essential security requirement

You must be a US citizen and eligible and willing to obtain a US security clearance.

Candidates who already hold an active clearance are strongly encouraged to apply. Due to the security-clearance requirements, this position is not available to Green Card holders, and visa sponsorship cannot be provided.

If you’ve built AI agents that operate beyond the comfort of the cloud—and you understand what it takes to engineer software that simply cannot fail—we’d love to hear from you.