Senior AI Agent Engineer for Secure Government Systems

Defense Unicorns; Springfield (VA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior AI Agentic Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners, building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem. You will design, integrate, and operationalize AI agents and agentic workflows within secure enterprise environments using LLMs, agent frameworks, and enterprise data.

The role emphasizes hands-on implementation, rapid prototyping, and collaboration with platform engineers and partners to move concepts to secure, repeatable

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building applications or systems with large language models.
• Experience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows.
• Strong programming in Python or similar language.
• Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise apps, databases, external tools.
• Experience with agent frameworks or orchestration approaches.
• Knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool calling, and prompt engineering.
• Experience with CI/CD in Git-based environments.
• Ability to prototype, test, and iterate in ambiguous environments.
• Understanding of software engineering fundamentals and system design.
• Ability to collaborate with platform engineers, government personnel, and vendors.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows with LLMs.
• Develop agent capabilities interacting with enterprise apps, data sources, and tools.
• Create secure, production-ready agentic workflows for enterprise data and services.
• Integrate models, agents, tools, and data into governed workflows.
• Prototype and evaluate models and agent frameworks for mission value.
• Develop testing frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, and latency.
• Implement guardrails and policy controls for agent behavior and access.
• Integrate agentic workloads with CI/CD and DevSecOps practices.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to deploy on Kubernetes/OpenShift.
• Work with commercial partners to integrate capabilities into the ecosystem.
• Troubleshoot across models, APIs, data sources, networking, identity, and infra.
• Document architectures, patterns, and operational procedures.
• Identify reusable capabilities to productize in secure gov environments.

Skills

LLMs

Agent frameworks

Python

APIs

CI/CD

Kubernetes

OpenShift

RAG

Tools

NVIDIA NeMo

Job description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior AI Agentic Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners, building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem. You will design, integrate, and operationalize AI agents and agentic workflows within secure enterprise environments using LLMs, agent frameworks, and enterprise data.

The role emphasizes hands-on implementation, rapid prototyping, and collaboration with platform engineers and partners to move concepts to secure, repeatable