Remote Data & ML Engineer for AI Decision Systems

DEFCON AI; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote work

Salary, bonus, and equity

Employer-paid health insurance for you

Unlimited PTO

Flexible work environment

Parental leave 14 weeks

Job summary

Defcon AI is seeking a Data & ML Engineer to build the data and model layer behind an AI-enabled decision-support system in a fully remote role with occasional travel. You will ingest data from multiple sources, resolve records, provide explainable outputs, and ensure provenance and traceability in a security-conscious environment.

The role emphasizes probabilistic matching, calibration of relevance scores, and grounded generation.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering or ML engineering experience.
• Strong Python and SQL, with large, imperfect data.
• Experience delivering systems for sustained operational use.
• US Citizenship Required and Active US Secret clearance.
• Willingness to travel up to 25% to customer sites, DEFCON AI HQ, and vendor facilities.
• Ability to explain technical decisions to a stakeholder who may not understand internals.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain the graph of entities, records, and their typed relationships.
• Implement probabilistic matching, including blocking, candidate generation, scoring, clustering, and threshold policy.
• Build deduplication and known-record suppression; establish provenance for traceability.
• Develop relevance and priority models and calibrate scores.
• Embed embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval across a provenance-tracked evidence base.
• Integrate LMs via approved managed service and maintain self-hosted open-weight options.
• Document assumptions, telemetry, and enforce gated release of changes.
• Ingest, transform, validate, and publish data with schema validation and audit logging.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data engineering

AI-assisted development

Tools

PostgreSQL

pgvector

Airflow

Spark

Kafka

dbt

AWS Glue

Job description

Defcon AI is seeking a Data & ML Engineer to build the data and model layer behind an AI-enabled decision-support system in a fully remote role with occasional travel. You will ingest data from multiple sources, resolve records, provide explainable outputs, and ensure provenance and traceability in a security-conscious environment.

The role emphasizes probabilistic matching, calibration of relevance scores, and grounded generation.