Here's a long thread on just this topic here on Hacker News. One of their senior engineers jumped in to "clarify". It's worth reading the entire exchange.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1461136
I think these days they've deobfuscated the roles a bit. But back during this discussion, they were definitely hiring and mixing in sales people with their "deployed" engineers. Most of these guys would probably be sales engineers somewhere else, relegated to a life of doing canned demos for commission scraps.
It's actually kind of smart from a sales POV, embed your sales guy in the government site, call them engineers and let them have unlimited upsell opportunities.
You've basically tricked your customer to put one of your sales guys on staff.
From a customer POV, when you figure out the guy your paying $300k/yr to have on-site is just triaging issues and calling in real engineers to spot shoot issues, then spending their downtime trying to sell more software inside your organization it's kind of irritating.
