Staff Applied ML Engineer — Production AI for Federal Missions

Red Cell Partners, LLC.; Washington; On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Career growth

Family health coverage

Paid leave 14 weeks

Unlimited PTO

Professional development

401K / FSA / equity

Mental health support

GLP-1 solutions

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. You’ll work across LLMs, model fine-tuning, agentic workflows, and evaluation, translating mission needs into reliable software used in real environments.

You will collaborate with Forward Deployed and Software Engineers, sometimes with customers, to solve operational problems and improve models and tools for edge, cloud, and on-prem deployments.

Qualifications

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

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

RAG retrieval systems

Agentic systems

Model evaluation

Model tuning/fine-tuning

Job description

Red Cell Federal is seeking 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, agentic workflows, and evaluation, translating mission needs into reliable software used in real environments.

You will collaborate with Forward Deployed and Software Engineers, sometimes with customers, to solve operational problems and improve models and tools for edge, cloud, and on-prem deployments.