Lead Forward-Deployed Infrastructure Engineer (Air-Gapped Systems)
Take our stack across the air gap — package, deploy, and maintain sovereign Kenshiki appliances on bare-metal hardware inside secure enclaves.
Stack: Bare-metal Linux, Kubernetes/Docker, PostgreSQL, local LLM inference (vLLM/Ollama), zero-trust networking
Why this role exists
Our target clients — defense, financial institutions, secure government — operate in zero-trust environments where sending data to a third-party API is a compliance violation. They need Kenshiki's enforcement architecture running on their hardware, inside their network, with no external dependencies. We've built the engine. You take it across the air gap and make it run.
What you'll do
- Package for air-gapped deployment. Bundle the full TypeScript/PostgreSQL stack alongside open-weight LLMs and embedding models into immutable offline artifacts — Docker tarballs, Helm charts, everything needed to install where npm install and docker pull don't exist.
- Provision bare-metal hardware. Configure client servers — Linux kernel tuning, NVIDIA drivers, local inference engine optimization (vLLM, Ollama) — to maximize utilization without external dependencies.
- Secure the database. Deploy PostgreSQL with encryption at rest (FIPS 140-2), integrate with client IAM systems, and meet enterprise compliance standards for data handling.
- Represent Kenshiki on-site. Work directly with client IT and security officers to navigate firewall rules, zero-trust architectures, and compliance audits. You are the face of our engineering in their facility.
What we're looking for
- Linux & networking depth: Bare-metal provisioning, complex networking topologies. You debug with raw logs, not cloud dashboards.
- Offline containerization: Expert Docker and Kubernetes in on-premise, disconnected environments.
- Hardware literacy: VRAM constraints, PCIe bandwidth, and how to physically optimize an inference server (L4, H100, or equivalent) for maximum throughput on large language models.
- Security clearance: Experience in regulated or classified environments. Active or recent DoD clearance is a strong plus; eligibility for clearance is required.
- Independence: You can fly to a client site, assess their infrastructure, and solve the deployment problems without waiting for instructions.
Why Kenshiki?
While most of the industry builds wrappers around third-party APIs, you'll deploy fully sovereign, governed AI systems into the most secure facilities that exist. The Clean Room environment was designed for exactly this.