Senior AI Engineer — Autonomous Space V&V (TS/SCI)

Sway; Colorado Springs, Northern (CO, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Job summary

Slingshot Aerospace seeks a Senior AI Engineer focused on agentic evaluation and verification and validation (V&V). You’ll join the AI and Data Science team within Slingshot’s R&D organization to develop evaluation frameworks and simulation-backed validation for autonomous mission planning systems.

You will collaborate with researchers to translate mission concepts into testable evaluation systems, implement end-to-end evaluations, and maintain SDKs and tooling that support TALOS benchmarks and

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, applied AI, or equivalent experience.
• Strong Python engineering skills with experience building SDKs, libraries, or evaluation tooling.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, metrics, or test harnesses for AI/ML systems.
• Ability to analyze system behavior, identify failure modes, and evaluate performance in complex autonomous or semi-autonomous systems.
• Familiarity with modern agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, or protocol-based integrations.
• Experience working in cross-functional, multidisciplinary teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Must be a U.S. citizen and possess an active Top Secret / SCI (TS/SCI) clearance.

Responsibilities

• Extend and maintain Slingshot’s V&V SDK and evaluation framework for simulation-backed validation of agentic AI systems.
• Design and implement agent-level and end-to-end evaluations, including benchmark scenarios, scoring logic, and experiment harnesses.
• Build benchmark scenarios and tooling that measure planning, reasoning, and operational performance for autonomous mission planning systems.
• Translate astrodynamics and mission-domain concepts into executable evaluation scenarios and simulation configurations.
• Develop reusable SDK interfaces, adapters, and evaluation utilities that connect V&V systems, TALOS benchmarks, and agent workflows.
• Define and apply metrics for capability evaluation, failure analysis, regression detection, and comparative benchmarking.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to identify evaluation needs and contribute to improving coverage of critical capabilities.
• Contribute to best practices for evaluating complex, autonomous AI systems.
• Uphold strong engineering standards through testing, documentation, reproducibility, and maintainable system design.

Skills

Python

SDK development

Evaluation tooling

ML/AI

Education

Bachelor’s degree in a relevant science or engineering field

Tools

LangGraph

Job description

Slingshot Aerospace seeks a Senior AI Engineer focused on agentic evaluation and verification and validation (V&V). You’ll join the AI and Data Science team within Slingshot’s R&D organization to develop evaluation frameworks and simulation-backed validation for autonomous mission planning systems.

You will collaborate with researchers to translate mission concepts into testable evaluation systems, implement end-to-end evaluations, and maintain SDKs and tooling that support TALOS benchmarks and