Senior AI Agentic Engineer — Remote (US)

Defense Unicorns; Springfield (VA); Remote; USD 149,000 - 201,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Life Insurance

Disability Insurance

401k Retirement Plan

Company Stock Options

Home Office Budget

Job summary

Defense Unicorns seeks a senior AI Agentic Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. You will design, implement, and operationalize AI agents across secure enterprise environments and integrate them with APIs, data sources, and toolchains.

The role emphasizes hands-on development, rapid prototyping, evaluating models and frameworks, and delivering repeatable, mission-ready agentic capabilities with guardrails and CI/CD integration.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building applications or systems using large language models and generative AI.
• Experience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows.
• Strong programming experience in Python and/or another modern programming language.
• Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise applications, databases, and external tools.
• Experience with one or more agent frameworks or orchestration approaches.
• Working knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and prompt engineering.
• Experience developing software in a Git-based, automated CI/CD environment.
• Ability to rapidly prototype, test, troubleshoot, and iterate in ambiguous environments.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including testing, version control, APIs, debugging, and system design.
• Ability to work effectively alongside platform engineers, government personnel, and multiple technology vendors.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern LLM and agentic technologies.
• 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 deployed in controlled environments.
• Work with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, MCP, and related technologies.
• Develop mechanisms for agents to securely discover, access, reason over, and act upon approved enterprise data and services.
• Prototype and rapidly evaluate emerging models, agent frameworks, and AI capabilities to create measurable value.
• Develop evaluation and testing frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and task completion.
• Implement guardrails and policy controls governing agent behavior, tool access, data access, and human approval points.
• Integrate agentic capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows; collaborate with platform engineers for Kubernetes/OpenShift deployments.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize AI workloads within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.
• Work with commercial AI partners to integrate capabilities into the broader engineering ecosystem.
• Troubleshoot issues across models, agent frameworks, APIs, data sources, networking, identity, and infrastructure.
• Develop reusable patterns for agent deployment, configuration, observability, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Document architectures, integration patterns, agent specifications, evaluation results, and operational procedures.
• Identify recurring AI engineering challenges to standardize, automate, or productize.

Skills

LLM integration

Agentic workflows

Python

APIs & enterprise apps

CI/CD & DevSecOps

Kubernetes/OpenShift

Agent frameworks

RAG & embeddings

Prompt engineering

Git-based CI/CD

Tools

LangChain

LangGraph

LlamaIndex

Semantic Kernel

NVIDIA NeMo

OpenShift AI

Kubernetes

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Defense Unicorns seeks a senior AI Agentic Engineer to embed with a government team and partners, building an AI-powered engineering ecosystem. You will design, implement, and operationalize AI agents across secure enterprise environments and integrate them with APIs, data sources, and toolchains.

The role emphasizes hands-on development, rapid prototyping, evaluating models and frameworks, and delivering repeatable, mission-ready agentic capabilities with guardrails and CI/CD integration.