Senior Data & ML Engineer: Remote AI for Resilient Ops

Defcon; United States; On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Health insurance

Unlimited PTO

Parental leave

Job summary

DEFCON AI seeks a Data & ML Engineer to build the data and model layer behind an AI-enabled decision-support system in a fully remote role with occasional travel. You’ll handle ingestion from multiple sources, record resolution against a shared model, relevance scoring, and generation of explanations that users can act on and defend.

The role emphasizes robust provenance, probabilistic matching, and calibrated scoring, with existing platform architecture and an opportunity to add new

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, applied machine learning, ML engineering, or production analytics engineering.
• Strong Python and SQL, with experience working with large, imperfect operational data.
• Experience delivering systems for sustained operational use rather than exploratory analysis alone.
• Routine use of AI-assisted development, with informed judgment about where it adds value and where its output requires verification.
• Ability to explain a technical decision to a stakeholder who must defend that decision without understanding its internals.
• US Citizenship Required.
• Active US Secret clearance. The work is performed in a controlled government cloud environment and requires a favorable investigation and CAC eligibility from the start.
• Elevated personnel security requirements apply to portions of this work and are discussed during screening.
• Willingness to travel up to 25% to customer sites, DEFCON AI HQ, and vendor facilities as required.

Responsibilities

• Data Modeling and Record Matching: design and maintain the graph of entities, records, and typed relationships.
• Scoring and Calibration: develop relevance and priority models and calibrations.
• Retrieval and Generation: implement embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval; design prompts and output schemas.
• Pipelines and Source Handling: build secure ingestion, transformation, and publishing across sources.
• Engineering Standards: document assumptions, etc., and maintain audit trails and gated releases.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data engineering

ML engineering

Production analytics

Tools

PostgreSQL

pgvector

Graph databases

Job description

DEFCON AI seeks a Data & ML Engineer to build the data and model layer behind an AI-enabled decision-support system in a fully remote role with occasional travel. You’ll handle ingestion from multiple sources, record resolution against a shared model, relevance scoring, and generation of explanations that users can act on and defend.

The role emphasizes robust provenance, probabilistic matching, and calibrated scoring, with existing platform architecture and an opportunity to add new