Staff Applied ML Engineer, Federal/National Security

Fdetimes; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Career track advancement

Health care for you and family

Paid parental leave

Unlimited PTO

Professional development

401K / equity incentives

Mental health benefits

GLP-1 solutions via Crux

Job summary

Red Cell Federal is seeking a Staff Applied ML Engineer to build and deploy production AI systems for federal and national security missions, working with LLMs, fine-tuning, and agentic workflows. You’ll collaborate with engineers and customers to translate mission needs into reliable software in real environments.

You will evaluate models, design retrieval systems, and optimize inference for production use, balancing experimentation with deployment and customer feedback.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building ML or AI systems and deploying in production.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models.
• Ability to move comfortably between ML experimentation and production engineering.

Responsibilities

• Build production LLM-powered applications, AI agents, and agentic workflows.
• Develop and own model evaluation, fine-tuning, adaptation, and experimentation pipelines.
• Determine when to use prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, specialized models, or combinations of these approaches.
• Build rigorous eval systems for model and agent quality, reliability, tool use, and task completion.
• Develop retrieval and context systems across structured and unstructured mission data.
• Optimize models and inference for production environments.
• Deploy and improve models based on real-world performance and user feedback.
• Partner with FDEs and customers to translate mission requirements into production AI capabilities.
• Turn solutions developed for individual deployments into reusable platform capabilities.

Skills

Production ML systems

LLMs

Foundation models

LLM fine-tuning

Model evaluation

RAG systems

Agentic systems

Model serving

Embeddings

Knowledge retrieval

Synthetic data

Guardrails

ML to production

Independent work

Customer-facing AI

Job description

About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

About the Role

Red Cell Federal is hiring a Staff Applied ML Engineer to build and deploy production AI systems for federal and national security missions.

You’ll work across LLMs, model fine-tuning and adaptation, agentic systems, RAG, evaluation, and inference, helping turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into reliable software that operates in real mission environments.

This isn't a pure research role, and it isn't an ML infrastructure role removed from users. You'll work alongside Forward Deployed and Software Engineers, occasionally directly with customers, to understand operational problems and determine how models, data, agents, and software can solve them.

Red Cell Federal's platform is being designed to support interchangeable models, including specialized smaller models for edge use cases, and to operate across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments.

What You'll Do

• Build production LLM-powered applications, AI agents, and agentic workflows
• Develop and own model evaluation, fine-tuning, adaptation, and experimentation pipelines
• Determine when to use prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, specialized models, or combinations of these approaches
• Build rigorous eval systems for model and agent quality, reliability, tool use, and task completion
• Develop retrieval and context systems across structured and unstructured mission data
• Optimize models and inference for production environments
• Deploy and improve models based on real-world performance and user feedback
• Partner with FDEs and customers to translate mission requirements into production AI capabilities
• Turn solutions developed for individual deployments into reusable platform capabilities

What We're Looking For

• Significant experience building ML or AI systems and deploying in production
• Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models
• Deep expertise in several of the following:
• LLM fine-tuning / model adaptation
• Model evaluation
• RAG and retrieval systems
• Agentic systems and tool use
• Model serving / inference
• Embeddings and knowledge retrieval
• Synthetic data
• Guardrails and AI reliability
• Ability to move comfortably between ML experimentation and production engineering
• Ability to operate independently against ambiguous technical problems
• Interest in working close to users and seeing how AI performs against real operational workflows

Why This Role

The challenge here isn't proving that an LLM can perform a task. It's figuring out how to make AI reliable enough to use in production, measurable enough to know when it fails, adaptable enough to improve quickly, and practical enough to operate within real national security environments.

Red Cell Federal is focused on that "agentic last mile": operationalizing and deploying AI against mission requirements rather than stopping at decision support or prototypes.

If you want to work deeply on the models and stay close enough to the problem to see whether what you built actually works, let’s talk!

Clearance / Eligibility

Because this role supports federal and national-security customers, U.S. citizenship is required with an Active Secret or Top-Secret Security Clearance.

Location

Washington, DC / Northern Virginia preferred. This role may require regular customer-facing work, including onsite meetings, secure-facility work, or travel depending on program needs.

Salary Range: $180,000-240,000 + bonus + equity. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

#LI-RCP

Our Red Cell Partners Benefits (may differ for each incubation)

For full-time roles

• Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows
• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
• Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
• Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
• Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
• Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
• Mental health benefits are available through Tara Mind.
• Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux.

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

Applicant Data Disclosure

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC (“Red Cell”) uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, “Hiring Platforms”). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:

• Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;
• Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;
• Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories.

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact [e-mail].

Red Cell requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Red Cell's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Notice.