AI Engineer (Supporting MDA)

What You'll Be Doing

• Provide SETA support to government teams developing or assessing AI-enabled applications and tools.
• Advise on technical approaches for AI application design, prototyping, integration, and evaluation.
• Assess solutions involving LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, tool use, agentic workflows, orchestration layers, prompt pipelines, and evaluation harnesses.
• Support the review of architectures, development approaches, model usage patterns, and technical risk areas.
• Advise on AI engineering considerations such as latency, reliability, observability, testability, guardrails, data flow, and system integration.
• Evaluate and compare modern AI frameworks, agentic libraries, and experimentation harnesses for suitability in mission use cases.
• Aid in the development of technical guidance, prototypes, engineering recommendations, and briefings for government stakeholders.
• Support test and evaluation activities for AI tools, including performance assessment, qualitative review, and workflow validation.
• Collaborate with platform engineers, product leads, mission users, and government leadership to ensure AI efforts remain technically grounded and operationally relevant.
• Stay current on rapid changes in the AI ecosystem and provide informed recommendations on emerging tools and practices.

Required Skills

• Masters degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Mathematics, or related field and 12+ years of relevant experience.
• Active Secret clearance required.
• Experience designing, building, integrating, or evaluating AI/ML-enabled applications or software tools.
• Familiarity with modern AI application patterns, including LLM-based applications, RAG, prompt engineering, agentic systems, and AI-assisted workflows.
• Experience with software development fundamentals, APIs, data handling, and system integration.
• Ability to assess technical tradeoffs and communicate them clearly to both engineers and government stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Desired Skills

• Ability to obtain a TS SCI clearance required.
• Experience with Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar languages commonly used in AI application development.
• Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings, model APIs, evaluation frameworks, and agent testing harnesses.
• Exposure to model hosting, inference pipelines, or cloud-based AI development environments.
• Understanding of secure AI development practices, data protection, and operational constraints in government settings.
• Experience supporting defense, cyber, intelligence, or mission application development.
• Familiarity with human-in-the-loop workflows, AI assurance, and evaluation methodologies.
• Experience with one or more agentic or orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, Haystack, LlamaIndex, or similar ecosystems.

Position Requirements

• Clearance Required: Secret
• Years Related Work Experience: 12
• Education Level Required: Master's
• Mission Driven Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer, including disability/veterans.