Staff Applied ML Engineer: Production AI for Defense

Red Cell Partners, LLC.; Tacoma (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Career track advancement

Comprehensive health care for you and

Paid maternity/paternity for 14 weeks

Unlimited PTO

Professional development

401K, FSA & equity incentives

Mental health benefits

GLP-1 solutions access

Job summary

Red Cell Federal is hiring a Staff Applied ML Engineer to build and deploy production AI systems for federal and national security missions in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia. You’ll work with LLMs, model fine-tuning, RAG, and agentic workflows to translate mission needs into reliable software for real environments.

The role combines ML experimentation with production engineering, collaborating with engineers and customers to ensure models meet operational requirements.

Qualifications

• Significant experience building ML/AI systems and deploying in production.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models.
• Deep expertise in LLM fine-tuning, model adaptation, evaluation, RAG, agentic systems, or serving.

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.
• 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 deployments into reusable platform capabilities.

Skills

Production AI systems

LLM foundations

Agentic systems

RAG and retrieval

Model evaluation

Fine-tuning & adaptation

Deployment in production

Job description

Red Cell Federal is hiring a Staff Applied ML Engineer to build and deploy production AI systems for federal and national security missions in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia. You’ll work with LLMs, model fine-tuning, RAG, and agentic workflows to translate mission needs into reliable software for real environments.

The role combines ML experimentation with production engineering, collaborating with engineers and customers to ensure models meet operational requirements.