Senior AI/ML Engineer – Mission-Critical Cyber Ops (TS/SCI)

Lever, Inc.; Fort Meade (MD); On-site; USD 155,000 - 175,000; Full time

Job summary

Agile Defense seeks a Senior AI/ML Engineer to join the AI Enterprise capability at Fort Meade, MD. You will design, integrate, and govern AI/ML workflows, tuning models and agents for mission-critical operations.

You will collaborate with data scientists to turn prototypes into production-grade capabilities and ensure secure, scalable enterprise AI across the platform. Ideal candidates have 8+ years in AI/ML, Python expertise, and a TS/SCI clearance with poly.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related discipline and 8+ years of experience
• Advanced proficiency in Python for AI/ML application development
• Demonstrated experience building or integrating LLM/agent-based systems in production
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and prompt/context engineering
• Ability to manage competing priorities in fast-paced mission environments and identify/escalate operational risks early
• Active TS/SCI clearance w/Poly

Responsibilities

• Provide embedded operations support, capability integration, and rapid prototyping for AI/ML-enabled tools in support of our customer.
• Design and integrate LLM/agent orchestration workflows using agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Agno, and the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit.
• Tune model gateway routing logic to select, evaluate, and optimize across multiple frontier and open-weight models for cost, performance, and mission fit.
• Develop and integrate RAG pipelines, vector databases, and memory services to give agents access to mission knowledge and context.
• Implement MCP (Model Context Protocol)-based tool-broker integrations so agents can safely and securely access enterprise tools and data.
• Evaluate, benchmark, and tune models and agent behaviors; build automated evaluation pipelines to track quality, safety, and performance over time.
• Partner with data scientists and mission analysts to translate research and prototypes into production-grade AI capabilities for the command.
• Implement AI governance guardrails — content/safety filters, policy enforcement, and approval gates — for agentic workflows, and document model/agent architectures and evaluation results for reuse.
• Research and evaluate emerging LLM, agent, and AI tooling to keep the command's AI capability current and adaptable.

Skills

Python for AI/ML

LLM/agent-based systems

RAG + vector databases

prompt/context engineering

TS/SCI clearance w/ Poly

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Data Science

Tools

LangGraph

Agno

NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit

NVIDIA NIM

vLLM

Ollama

LiteLLM

Job description

Agile Defense seeks a Senior AI/ML Engineer to join the AI Enterprise capability at Fort Meade, MD. You will design, integrate, and govern AI/ML workflows, tuning models and agents for mission-critical operations.

You will collaborate with data scientists to turn prototypes into production-grade capabilities and ensure secure, scalable enterprise AI across the platform. Ideal candidates have 8+ years in AI/ML, Python expertise, and a TS/SCI clearance with poly.