Data & AI Engineer (Agentic Systems)
Defense Unicorns1 day ago
Springfield, VA, USAMid Level / Senior
Base Salary
$149k - $201k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and maintain agentic AI applications integrating LLMs, tools, APIs, and enterprise data.
- Develop AI agents that execute multi-step tasks, interact with external services, and coordinate actions across existing systems.
- Implement agent orchestration, tool calling, workflow state management, error handling, and human oversight.
- Build and integrate RAG pipelines, semantic search, embeddings, and vector-based retrieval.
- Develop Python backend services and REST APIs and integrate applications with external services, data sources, enterprise platforms, and existing software workflows.
- Establish testing, evaluation, monitoring, reliability, documentation, reusable components, and operational standards for AI agents and LLM-powered applications.
- Collaborate with data and platform engineers to access governed enterprise data and deploy AI applications in Kubernetes/OpenShift and CI/CD environments.
- Troubleshoot issues across agent behavior, APIs, data access, application services, infrastructure, and AI components.
- Work with government engineers and commercial technology partners to resolve integration challenges and support mission delivery.
Requirements
- Approximately 3–5 years of software engineering experience or equivalent demonstrated technical capability.
- Hands-on experience building agentic AI applications, including AI agents, LLM tool calling, multi-step workflows, or agent orchestration.
- Strong proficiency with Python and backend software development.
- Experience integrating LLMs into applications through APIs, SDKs, or comparable technologies.
- Experience building and integrating REST APIs and connecting applications with external services or data sources.
- Understanding of agent workflows, tool execution, state management, and error handling.
- Experience with Git, testing, debugging, cloud-native or containerized environments, and modern software development practices.
- Ability to troubleshoot across APIs, data services, infrastructure, and AI components and translate ambiguous mission needs into working software.
- Active Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility.
- Ability to support approximately 2–3 days per week onsite in Springfield, Virginia, with additional onsite presence as mission needs increase.
- Preferred experience with LangGraph, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, or comparable agentic AI frameworks.
- Preferred experience developing multi-agent systems, autonomous workflows, AI-enabled software development tools, Model Context Protocol, function calling, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, semantic search, or knowledge graphs.
- GEOINT experience is preferred but not required.
Benefits
- Remote-USA arrangement with approximately 2–3 days per week onsite in Springfield, Virginia, increasing as mission needs require.
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage with premiums 100% company paid.
- Health Savings Account, life insurance, and disability insurance.
- 401(k) retirement plan, company stock options, and home office budget.
- Flexible Time Off, federal holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s.
- Paid parental leave.
- Reimbursement for approved training and subscriptions and conference travel, lodging, and fees.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Defense Unicorns
Defense Unicorns builds platform software and services that streamline secure, cloud-native delivery for defense and federal programs, with emphasis on DevSecOps, Kubernetes, and air‑gapped environments. It provides software and professional services under government contracts to deploy open-architecture platforms and CI/CD pipelines across classified and disconnected systems. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Colorado Springs, the privately held company serves U.S. defense and national security agencies.