Senior AI/ML Engineer

Agile Defense•Fort Meade, MD

19h•Onsite

About The Position

Ready for a challenge that puts you at the center of AI innovation for cyber operations? Are you an experienced AI/ML engineer who thrives in a fast-paced environment, enjoys turning research and prototypes into real mission capability, and wants to help shape how AI is built and delivered across a national mission? Our team is standing up an AI Enterprise capability — the central hub that mission teams turn to when they want to move an AI solution from prototype to a secure, governed, enterprise-scale service. As a Senior AI/ML Engineer on this team, you will design and integrate the models, agents, and AI workflows that run on that platform, with significant, visible impact on the mission.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related discipline and 8+ years of experience
Advanced proficiency in Python for AI/ML application development
Demonstrated experience building or integrating LLM/agent-based systems in production
Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and prompt/context engineering
Ability to manage competing priorities in fast-paced mission environments and identify/escalate operational risks early
Active TS/SCI clearance w/Poly

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting mission environments
Experience with frameworks such as LangGraph, Agno, or the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit
Experience with model inference/serving platforms (NVIDIA NIM, vLLM, Ollama, LiteLLM)
Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar tool-broker/integration standards
Experience with AI evaluation frameworks, model benchmarking, and observability (logs/metrics/traces) for AI workloads

Responsibilities

Provide embedded operations support, capability integration, and rapid prototyping for AI/ML-enabled tools in support of our customer.
Design and integrate LLM/agent orchestration workflows using agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Agno, and the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit.
Tune model gateway routing logic to select, evaluate, and optimize across multiple frontier and open-weight models for cost, performance, and mission fit.
Develop and integrate RAG pipelines, vector databases, and memory services to give agents access to mission knowledge and context.
Implement MCP (Model Context Protocol)-based tool-broker integrations so agents can safely and securely access enterprise tools and data.
Evaluate, benchmark, and tune models and agent behaviors; build automated evaluation pipelines to track quality, safety, and performance over time.
Partner with data scientists and mission analysts to translate research and prototypes into production-grade AI capabilities for the command.
Implement AI governance guardrails — content/safety filters, policy enforcement, and approval gates — for agentic workflows, and document model/agent architectures and evaluation results for reuse.
Research and evaluate emerging LLM, agent, and AI tooling to keep the command's AI capability current and adaptable.

Benefits

Employees of Agile Defense are our number one priority, and the importance we place on our culture here is fundamental.
Our culture is alive and evolving, but it always stays true to its roots.
Here, you are valued as a family member, and we believe that we can accomplish great things together.
Agile Defense has been highly successful in the past few years due to our employees and the culture we create together.
We call it the 6Hs, the values that define our culture and guide everything we do.
Together, these values infuse vibrancy, integrity, and a tireless work ethic into advancing the most important national security and critical civilian missions.
It's how we show up every day.
It's who we are.
Happy - Be Infectious.
Helpful - Be Supportive.
Honest - Be Trustworthy.
Humble - Be Grounded.
Hungry - Be Eager.
Hustle - Be Driven.