Forward Deployed AI Engineer (FedD149B/ FedD110)

About the role

The Forward Deployed AI Engineer partners with defense and national‑security customers to design, build, and deploy backend generative‑AI systems on the Unified Defense Stack, handling everything from problem discovery through production deployment across cloud, on‑prem and air‑gapped environments, while feeding field insights back to product teams.

About the company

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery for defense and civil agencies, building secure, cloud‑native, open‑source solutions for continuous integration and delivery. The team of innovators, engineers, and veterans focuses on security, speed, and user experience while supporting U.S. government and private enterprises.

Requirements

• 4+ years of backend or full‑stack engineering experience with production‑grade Python.
• Experience designing and operating data pipelines, APIs, and integration layers in production.
• Hands‑on experience with information retrieval systems such as keyword search, vector search, document parsing and chunking, reranking, or search engine internals (e.g., Elasticsearch, OpenSearch).
• Working knowledge of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) patterns or applied generative AI connecting LLMs to real data sources in production.
• Experience deploying or operating software in government, defense, or similarly regulated/high‑assurance environments.
• Strong communication skills for translating technical work to non‑technical stakeholders and building customer trust.
• Ability to work with ambiguity, shift priorities, take initiative, and deliver under pressure.
• Eligibility to obtain a U.S. security clearance.
• Experience deploying applications on Kubernetes in air‑gapped or classified environments (preferred).
• Familiarity with open‑source LLMs/SLMs (Llama, Mixtral, Gemma, Phi) and related inference frameworks, structured output, or fine‑tuning (preferred).
• Experience developing and maintaining LLM evaluation frameworks (preferred).
• Background in document processing pipelines: parsing, chunking, embedding, and indexing at scale (preferred).
• Active security clearance (Secret or above) (preferred).
• Prior customer‑facing or forward‑deployed engineering experience (preferred).