ML Engineer - Scaled Retrieval & Grounded Generation

DEFCON AI, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Top-of-market salary, bonus, equity

Employer-paid health insurance

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Travel to DC or other offices

Professional development

Job summary

DEFCON AI, Inc. is seeking an ML Engineer focused on Retrieval & Grounded Generation in the United States. You will build embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval at scale, and integrate language models so that every output is bound to cited sources with tested citation failures.

You will own prompts, output schemas, model packaging, versioning, serving, and rollback, plus telemetry to measure retrieval and generation quality. Active US Secret clearance and citizenship required.

Qualifications

• Strong Python with hands-on experience in embeddings and vector retrieval at scale.
• 5+ years of experience in production or near-production retrieval-augmented (RAG) systems built by you.
• Ability to discuss retrieval design, vector store choices, grounding tests, and rollback implementations.
• Active US Secret clearance required to start; US Citizenship required.
• 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.

Responsibilities

• Build embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval at scale with provenance tracking.
• Integrate language models to bind generated text to cited sources and test for citation failures.
• Design prompts and output schemas; own packaging, versioning, serving, and rollback.
• Instrument telemetry for retrieval and generation quality and measurement events.
• Provide bounded model assistance with outputs tied to source passages.
• Ensure the platform remains self-hosted or managed across providers.

Skills

Python

Embeddings

Vector retrieval

RAG system

Model deployment

Grounded generation

Retrieval design

Security clearance

Air-gapped environments

Tools

Vector store

Open-weight models

Job description

DEFCON AI, Inc. is seeking an ML Engineer focused on Retrieval & Grounded Generation in the United States. You will build embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval at scale, and integrate language models so that every output is bound to cited sources with tested citation failures.

You will own prompts, output schemas, model packaging, versioning, serving, and rollback, plus telemetry to measure retrieval and generation quality. Active US Secret clearance and citizenship required.