Senior AI Engineer (FedD239)

The role

The Senior AI Agentic Engineer will design, integrate, and operationalize AI agents and agentic workflows within a secure enterprise environment. This role focuses on moving AI capabilities from prototypes to secure, repeatable production workflows.

What you will do

• Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows.
• Develop agent capabilities that interact with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, and mission systems.
• Integrate models, agents, and tools into secure workflows for controlled and classified environments.
• Develop mechanisms for agents to access and act upon approved enterprise data and services.
• Prototype and evaluate emerging models and agent frameworks.
• Develop evaluation and testing frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, safety, and cost.
• Implement guardrails and policy controls governing agent behavior and access.
• Integrate agentic capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize AI workloads within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.
• Troubleshoot issues across models, agent frameworks, APIs, and infrastructure.

Required qualifications

• Active Top Secret clearance.
• Hands-on experience building applications or systems using large language models and generative AI.
• Experience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows.
• Strong programming experience in Python and/or another modern programming language.
• Experience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise applications, databases, and external tools.
• Experience with one or more agent frameworks or orchestration approaches.
• Working knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and prompt engineering.
• Experience developing software in a Git-based, automated CI/CD environment.
• Ability to rapidly prototype, test, troubleshoot, and iterate in ambiguous environments.
• Strong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including testing, version control, APIs, debugging, and system design.
• Ability to work effectively alongside platform engineers, government personnel, and multiple technology vendors.

Nice to have

• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tool-based agent architectures.
• Experience with multi-agent systems and agent orchestration.
• Experience with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, or comparable foundation model ecosystems.
• Experience with NVIDIA NIM, NeMo, or similar AI inference/model-serving technologies.
• Experience with Red Hat OpenShift AI or Kubernetes-based AI platforms.
• Experience with agent evaluation and observability frameworks.
• Experience implementing AI guardrails, policy enforcement, human-in-the-loop workflows, or AI safety controls.
• Experience with LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and enterprise search.
• Experience deploying AI systems in Secret or TS/SCI environments.

Benefits

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance
• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget
• Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
• Paid Parental Leave
• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

About the company

Defense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so customers can focus on the most important challenges. The team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.