[Hiring] ML Engineer, Retrieval & Grounded Generation @DEFCON AI

Role Description

You'll join the analytics and AI engineering team behind a system that genuinely matters: an AI-assisted platform that pulls together records from dozens of external feeds, resolves them to the right person, surfaces what a human reviewer should look at first, and explains every recommendation in plain, defensible terms — running inside a secure government cloud environment. It's the kind of problem where the details you get right are the ones that count, which is exactly what makes it worth doing well.

As ML Engineer, Retrieval & Grounded Generation, you'll:

• Build embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval at scale.
• Integrate language models so that every piece of generated text is bound to cited source records and citation failures are tested for rather than assumed away.
• Own prompt and output-schema design; model packaging, versioning, serving, and rollback.
• Instrument telemetry hooks for later measurement without manual reconstruction.

This is a fully remote role, with occasional travel to DEFCON AI HQ, customer sites, and vendor facilities as required.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience, including a production or near-production retrieval-augmented (RAG) system you built yourself.
• Ability to speak in detail to your retrieval design, vector store used, grounding tests, citation failures, and rollback processes.
• Strong Python skills, with hands-on experience in embeddings and vector retrieval at scale.
• Clarity on what actually shipped in past work — prototype, proposal, or deployed code.
• US Citizenship Required.
• Active US Secret clearance required to start.

Requirements

• Experience deploying models into restricted or air-gapped environments.
• Self-hosted or open-weight model operation.
• Fine-tuning, adapters, or custom embeddings.
• Federal DevSecOps, RMF, ATO, or DoW cloud environment experience.
• Active Top Secret clearance.

Benefits

• A fully remote, results-based environment.
• Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package.
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Unlimited PTO, with your manager's approval.
• Flexible work environment where you manage your work day.
• 14 weeks of fully-paid parental leave.
• Salary Range: $165,000–$200,000.