Forward Deployed Software Engineer

About Us

Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. Following the close of a $200M Series B, valuing the company at $1.4 billion, we are expanding our teams and capabilities to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces.

Our work is guided by clear values: building technologies with real-world impact, pursuing excellence in everything we do, setting ambitious goals, and taking on the hardest technical challenges. We operate in a demanding environment where rigor, ownership, and execution are expected.

Harmattan AI's mission is to build autonomous defense forces for allied nations — systems and platforms that let partner militaries operate with greater scale, coordination, and capability in contested environments. We're growing the team building and deploying our autonomous software systems: platforms that let partner militaries and defense organizations run AI-driven applications directly in the field, including disconnected and contested edge environments.

As a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, you'll spend your time writing code. You'll work with partner technical teams and end users to understand what they actually need, then design and build the solution yourself: architecture, implementation, testing, deployment. You'll be close enough to the mission to see why the problem matters, and you'll ship fast, because what you build gets used in the field almost immediately. Once a solution proves itself, you'll work with our core platform team to fold the durable parts back into the product, so your work keeps paying off beyond the deployment you built it for.

Responsibilities

• Design and build software applications that solve specific operational problems for our partners, owning them end-to-end from architecture through deployment.

• Take loosely defined, real-world requirements from partner militaries and organizations and turn them into working software, often on tight timelines.

• Build interfaces and connectors between our platforms and partner systems, and validate data flows end-to-end in the field.

• Deploy your solutions on site, gather feedback directly from operators, and iterate quickly based on what you see working (or not) in practice.

• Spot patterns and capabilities worth building into the core product, and work with our platform engineering team to get them there.

• Debug issues in live operational settings, drive them to resolution, and document what you learn along the way.

• Build real working relationships with client technical teams and end users so you understand their problems well enough to solve them properly.

Requirements

• 4+ years building and shipping production software, in Python and at least one systems language (C++, Rust, Go).

• A track record of building, not configuring: projects, internships, or early-career work where you took an ambiguous problem to a working, deployed solution.

• Comfortable owning software end-to-end — design, build, debug, deploy — including on Linux, in operational or field conditions.

• Able to reason across an integrated system and its external interfaces, not just your own component.

• Confident and clear communicating with client technical teams and senior stakeholders, without losing the instinct to go build the thing.

• Practical under constraint: ill-defined problems, tight deadlines, and a working solution over a theoretically perfect one.

• Travel: frequent on site with partners, domestic and international.

• Proficiency in English is mandatory.

Nice to have

• Prior forward-deployed, solutions engineering, or customer-facing engineering experience.

• Depth in computer vision, deep learning, mission planning, robotics, or embedded software.

• Degree from a leading engineering school.

We look forward to hearing how you can help shape the future of autonomous defense systems at Harmattan AI.

We look forward to hearing how you can help shape the future of autonomous defense systems at Harmattan AI.