Staff Applied ML Engineer: Production AI for 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

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.