Senior AI Engineer (FedD239)
Defense Unicorns1 day ago
Springfield, VA, USASenior
Base Salary
$149k - $201k/yr
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows using LLMs and agent frameworks.
- Connect agents to enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, developer tools, and mission systems in secure and classified environments.
- Develop agent mechanisms for data and service discovery, access, reasoning, and action with appropriate identity and permissions.
- Prototype and evaluate emerging models, agent frameworks, and AI capabilities for mission and engineering value.
- Build evaluation and testing frameworks covering accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and task completion.
- Implement agent guardrails, policy controls, tool and data access controls, and human-in-the-loop approval points.
- Integrate AI capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows and operationalize workloads in Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.
- Develop reusable patterns for agent deployment, configuration, observability, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
- Troubleshoot issues spanning models, agent frameworks, APIs, data, networking, identity, and infrastructure.
- Document architectures, integration patterns, agent specifications, evaluation results, and operational procedures.
- Collaborate with platform engineers, government personnel, and commercial technology partners to productize repeatable AI capabilities.
Requirements
- Active Top Secret clearance is required.
- Hands-on experience building applications or systems with large language models and generative AI is required.
- Experience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows is required.
- Strong programming experience in Python and/or another modern programming language is required.
- Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise applications, databases, and external tools is required.
- Experience with agent frameworks or orchestration approaches is required.
- Working knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and prompt engineering is required.
- Experience developing software in a Git-based automated CI/CD environment is required.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including testing, version control, APIs, debugging, and system design, are required.
- Preferred experience includes MCP, multi-agent systems, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, NVIDIA NIM, NeMo, Red Hat OpenShift AI, Kubernetes-based AI platforms, agent evaluation and observability, AI guardrails, LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, RAG pipelines, knowledge graphs, enterprise search, classified or air-gapped environments, GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Xacta, GPUs, model serving, inference optimization, UDS, Zarf, Pepr, and Iron Bank.
- Ability to rapidly prototype, test, troubleshoot, evaluate emerging technologies, and make pragmatic build/buy/integrate decisions is preferred.
Benefits
- Remote position within the USA.
- 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, plus conference travel, lodging, and fees.
Tech Stack
Categories
AI ApplicationsForward Deployed
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.