ML Engineer, Applied AI – Crucible

Firestorm•San Diego, CA

4d•Onsite

About The Position

Firestorm builds uncrewed aircraft and the manufacturing network that produces them: full-capability plants, deployable xCell edge factories, and forward-deployed sites that stand up production near the point of need. Crucible is the software that runs that network. It combines production planning, execution, supply chain, and manufacturing data into a common model of how production operates. We are hiring a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to build the applied AI systems behind Crucible. You will work alongside data science and software engineering to productionize optimization and ML models, integrate foundation models into the platform, and build AI-assisted workflows grounded in Crucible's manufacturing data and system model. This is a hands-on engineering role, not a research position. We are looking for someone who has shipped ML and AI capabilities into real products and understands what it takes to make them reliable, measurable, and useful after the prototype works.

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government security clearance
5+ years building and shipping production software or ML systems, with a proven track record of success
Strong machine learning fundamentals, with hands-on experience beyond model API integration
Demonstrated technical ownership of AI/ML systems from experimentation through production, including implementation, architecture, evaluation, and debugging
Hands-on experience building production systems with LLMs or other foundation models
Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals
Experience with modern ML frameworks and transformer-based models
Experience designing evaluations and monitoring production AI/ML behavior
Demonstrated ability to make sound technical tradeoffs across model quality, reliability, latency, cost, and system complexity

Nice To Haves

Experience working with open-source models and local model inference
Experience with manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, or other operational software
Experience with model fine-tuning, inference optimization, or GPU deployment
Aerospace, defense, robotics, or other complex physical-system experience

Responsibilities

Build AI capabilities in Crucible — Develop AI-assisted workflows that use Crucible's data, APIs, and domain model to surface insights, answer questions, and help users make decisions.
Productionize decision models — Work with data science to integrate optimization, forecasting, and other models into reliable product capabilities.
Build AI systems end-to-end — Design model interfaces, retrieval, tool use, orchestration, evaluation, and the services required to run them in production.
Select and evaluate models — Choose models and approaches based on capability, reliability, latency, security, and deployment constraints.
Build for constrained environments — Support AI capabilities in cloud, air-gapped, and edge deployments where external model APIs may not be available.
Ground AI in real operations — Work with manufacturing, supply chain, and product teams to turn operational problems into useful AI features.
Set the technical direction for applied AI — Establish patterns, evaluation methods, and engineering standards for how AI is used across Crucible.

Benefits

Comprehensive medical, dental, and visions plans
401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
Equity grants for new hires
Unlimited PTO
Extremely generous company holiday calendar, including a holiday hiatus in July & December.
Generous Parental Leave
Lifestyle Spending Account
FSA
DCFSA
HSA
Hospital Indemnity insurance
Critical Illness insurance
Accident insurance
Basic Life/AD&D, short-term and long-term disability insurance, 100% covered by Firestorm.
Option to purchase additional life insurance for you and your family.
Mental Health Resources: Free mental health resources 24/7 including therapy and more.
Additional work-life services, such as free legal and financial support.