Staff Applied ML Engineer for National Security (Remote)

Red Cell Partners; Washington (District of Columbia); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Career track

Full health coverage

Maternity/Paternity leave

Unlimited PTO

Professional development

401K & equity options

Mental health benefits

GLP-1 solutions access

Job summary

Red Cell Federal is recruiting 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 to deliver reliable software for real mission environments.

This role emphasizes practical deployment, collaboration with engineers and customers, and operating across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building ML or AI systems and deploying in production.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models.
• Deep expertise in RAG and retrieval systems, agentic systems, embeddings, synthetic data, and AI reliability.

Responsibilities

• Build productionLLM-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

RAG retrieval systems

Agentic systems

Embeddings & knowledge retrieval

Synthetic data

AI reliability / guardrails

ML experimentation to production

Customer collaboration

Job description

Red Cell Federal is recruiting 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 to deliver reliable software for real mission environments.

This role emphasizes practical deployment, collaboration with engineers and customers, and operating across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments.