Founding Forward Deployed Research Engineer; FDRE - Clearance

Overview

Join to apply for the Founding Forward Deployed Research Engineer (FDRE - Clearance) role at poolside
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In this decade, the world will create Artificial General Intelligence. Only a small number of companies will achieve this. Their ability to stack advantages and pull ahead will define the winners. These companies will move faster than anyone else, attract the world's most capable talent, and be at the forefront of applied research, engineering, infrastructure, and deployment y will scale training to larger and more capable models, raise large amounts of capital along their journey, create powerful economic engines, and obsess over the success of their users and customers.

You’ll join a tight-knit group of engineers and researchers from leading labs and product companies (Deep Mind, Palantir, Git Hub, among others). The culture is low‑ego and high‑bar, organized around hard problems. It’s a place to learn by building—side‑by‑side with people who care about craft, rigor, and impact—on challenges that matter and aren’t found elsewhere.

As an FDRE, you’ll be embedded with customers, figuring out how to build real agentic systems to solve hard problems. This role gives you direct exposure to frontier AI R&D and a front‑row seat to the most valuable problems and industries on the planet. You’ll operate at the intersection of software engineering, applied AI, and agent research, designing and deploying high‑reliability systems while feeding signal back into our products and models.

This role requires US clearance.

• Own the mission end‑to‑end. Be the technical owner in the field, clarify goals, shape the plan, make hard calls, and ship systems that move real metrics.
• Partner for impact. Work directly with operators and executives to scope what matters most, then turn it into production results.
• Build with research in the loop. Collaborate with AI R&D on prompts, tools, and model improvements; bring back field‑signals that make the next model and the platform better.
• Turn wins into a flywheel. Convert patterns into playbooks, products, and libraries so every deployment is faster, more powerful, and more reliable.

• Software engineering & platforms:
  Backend services at scale; distributed systems; data/feature pipelines; queues/caching; fault tolerance.
• Agentic/LLM systems:
  Multi‑agent systems; agent communication/delegation; evals; long‑running, fault‑tolerant agents; tools/prompt/program design; guardrails.
• Evaluation & experimentation:
  Designing evals; monitoring performance/drift; fundamentals of Data Science/ML; turning hazy problems into structured exploration.
• Cloud & ops:
  Kubernetes, Docker, IaC (Terraform/CDK), networking, secrets, observability (Grafana/Prometheus/Datadog), CI/CD.
• Model ops:
  Fine‑tuning/RL; designing agent environments; managing inference.
• Enterprise delivery:
  Security/compliance, data governance, integration with legacy systems.

• Exceptional, high‑agency, low‑ego. Bias to action, collaborate well, and motivated by impact and outcome.
• Learning‑driven. Pick up new domains quickly, ask sharp questions, and remain comfortable with ambiguity.
• Product‑minded. Translate field pain into clean abstractions, docs, and tools others can use.
• Excellent communicator. Express ideas clearly, listen actively, and build rapport with customers and teammates alike.
• Adventurer. Eager and willing to travel, experience new things, and meet unforeseen challenges with creativity and resourcefulness.
• If you’re unsure whether you check every box, you should still apply! Impact beats pedigree here.

• Intro call with a member of the Forward Deployed team.
• Technical interview with a member of Engineering.
• Interview with another member of the Forward Deployed team.
• People interview with Beatriz, Head of People.

• Fully remote work & flexible hours.
• 37 days/year of vacation & holidays.
• Health insurance allowance for you and dependents.
• Company‑provided equipment.
• Wellbeing, always‑be‑learning, and home office allowances.
• Frequent team get‑togethers in Paris.
• Great diverse & inclusive people‑first culture.