Empowering Public Service Talent: Pyramid Systems & FedsForward

The partnership is built around a defined externship pipeline:

• Paid externships at Pyramid Systems for FedsForward candidates — students, recent graduates, and career-changers entering the federal-IT space.
• Real federal mission projects, not synthetic training environments. Externs work alongside senior engineers on production-bound code for client engagements.
• Structured mentorship from Pyramid's senior staff, with defined learning goals, regular check-ins, and feedback loops.
• A path to full-time conversion at Pyramid for high-performing externs — or, where appropriate, transition support into federal civil-service roles.

The model mirrors what we already do with our internal internship program. The FedsForward partnership widens the funnel of who gets access.

The federal IT workforce gap is structural, not cyclical. Demand for AI, cloud, DevSecOps, and analytics skills is growing faster than the standard hiring pipelines — both federal civil service and federal contracting — can supply. The April 2025 Executive Order on AI Education and the broader federal AI workforce strategy explicitly call on industry to be part of the solution.

Partnerships like Pyramid × FedsForward are part of how that gets done. They make federal-mission careers visible and accessible to candidates who might not have considered them — including candidates from regions, institutions, and backgrounds that historically have been under-recruited into the federal contracting industry. The pipeline benefits agencies that hire from it. The pipeline benefits Pyramid, who hires from it. The pipeline benefits candidates, who gain real federal-mission experience early in their careers.

Workforce development isn't a CSR program at Pyramid — it is part of how we deliver. On every federal engagement we run, junior staff are paired with senior engineers on production work. Architecture decision records, runbooks, and knowledge-transfer artifacts are produced as part of the deliverable, designed to survive contract turnover and equip the next team that inherits the work.

FedsForward is an extension of that posture. We invest in the people because federal mission systems — and the agencies that operate them — depend on a workforce that can build, run, and improve them after the initial contract ends. Building that workforce is part of the work, not adjacent to it.