Senior AI Agent Engineer for Secure Enterprise Platforms

defenseunicorns; Springfield (VA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Platform Engineer to embed with a government team and technology partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. The role focuses on designing, integrating, and operationalizing AI agents and workflows across LLMs, agent frameworks, enterprise data, APIs, tools, and platform services to deliver reliable, mission-relevant capabilities in production.

This hands-on position requires rapid prototyping, evaluation, and collaboration with platform engineers,

Qualifications

• Active Top Secret clearance is required.
• Hands-on experience building apps with LLMs and generative AI.
• Experience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows.
• Strong Python programming skills.
• Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise apps, databases and tools.
• Experience with one or more agent frameworks or orchestration approaches.
• Knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool calls, structured outputs, and prompt engineering.
• Experience with Git-based, automated CI/CD environments.
• Ability to prototype, test, and iterate in ambiguous environments.
• Solid fundamentals in software engineering, including APIs, debugging, and system design.
• Ability to collaborate with platform engineers, government personnel, and multiple vendors.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows.
• Develop agent capabilities that interact with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, developer tools, and mission systems.
• Integrate models, agents, tools, and enterprise data into secure workflows for deployed environments.
• Work with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, MCP, and related technologies.
• Develop mechanisms for agents to securely access approved enterprise data and services.
• Prototype and evaluate emerging models and agent frameworks for measurable value.
• Develop evaluation frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, latency, and cost.
• Implement guardrails and policy controls governing agent behavior and data access.
• Integrate agentic capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize AI workloads within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.
• Work with commercial AI partners to integrate capabilities into broader engineering ecosystem.
• Troubleshoot issues across models, agent frameworks, APIs, data sources, networking, and infrastructure.
• Develop reusable patterns for agent deployment, observability, and lifecycle management.
• Document architectures and patterns for agent implementations.

Skills

Top Secret clearance

LLM / Generative AI

AI agentic workflows

Python

API integration

Agent frameworks

RAG / embeddings

Git-based CI/CD

Prototype / debugging

Software fundamentals

collaboration with government vendors

Tools

Kubernetes/OpenShift

Git / CI/CD tooling

LangChain / LangGraph

NVIDIA NIM / NeMo

Job description

Defense Unicorns seeks a Senior Platform Engineer to embed with a government team and technology partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. The role focuses on designing, integrating, and operationalizing AI agents and workflows across LLMs, agent frameworks, enterprise data, APIs, tools, and platform services to deliver reliable, mission-relevant capabilities in production.

This hands-on position requires rapid prototyping, evaluation, and collaboration with platform engineers,