AI Engineer (Supporting MDA)

MDR is looking for an amazingly talented AI Engineer to join our team! In this role you will get to provide technical support for the design evaluation and advancement of AI-enabled applications tools and workflows. This role is intended for a hands-on technical professional who understands how modern AI systems are built and can help develop practical solutions using large language models agentic workflows orchestration frameworks and supporting software infrastructure. The right candidate is a builder at heart-someone who explores new frameworks prototypes ideas and continuously teaches themselves emerging techniques. Curiosity and passion matter greatly in this role. We want someone who follows the fast-moving AI ecosystem because they genuinely enjoy it not just because the job requires it.

What Youll Be Doing:

• Provide SETA support to government teams developing or assessing AI-enabled applications and tools.
• Advise on technical approaches for AI application design prototyping integration and evaluation.
• Assess solutions involving LLMs retrieval-augmented generation tool use agentic workflows orchestration layers prompt pipelines and evaluation harnesses.
• Support the review of architectures development approaches model usage patterns and technical risk areas.
• Advise on AI engineering considerations such as latency reliability observability testability guardrails data flow and system integration.
• Evaluate and compare modern AI frameworks agentic libraries and experimentation harnesses for suitability in mission use cases.
• Assist with the development of technical guidance prototypes engineering recommendations and briefings for government stakeholders.
• Support test and evaluation activities for AI tools including performance assessment qualitative review and workflow validation.
• Collaborate with platform engineers product leads mission users and government leadership to ensure AI efforts remain technically grounded and operationally relevant.
• Stay current on rapid changes in the AI ecosystem and provide informed recommendations on emerging tools and practices.

What Required Skills Youll Bring:

• Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering Data Science Mathematics or related field and 12 years of relevant experience
• Active Secret clearance required
• Experience designing building integrating or evaluating AI/ML-enabled applications or software tools.
• Familiarity with modern AI application patterns including LLM-based applications RAG prompt engineering agentic systems and AI-assisted workflows.
• Experience with software development fundamentals APIs data handling and system integration.
• Ability to assess technical tradeoffs and communicate them clearly to both engineers and government stakeholders.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

What Desired Skills Youll Bring:

• Ability to obtain a TS SCI clearance required
• Experience with Python JavaScript/TypeScript or similar languages commonly used in AI application development.
• Familiarity with vector databases embeddings model APIs evaluation frameworks and agent testing harnesses.
• Exposure to model hosting inference pipelines or cloud-based AI development environments.
• Understanding of secure AI development practices data protection and operational constraints in government settings.
• Experience supporting defense cyber intelligence or mission application development.
• Familiarity with human-in-the-loop workflows AI assurance and evaluation methodologies.
• Working knowledge of one or more agentic or orchestration frameworks such as LangChain LangGraph Semantic Kernel AutoGen CrewAI Haystack LlamaIndex or similar ecosystems.

Position Requirements

• Clearance Required
  • Secret
• Position Level
  • Principal
• FT/PT
  • Full Time
• Years Related Work Experience
  • 12
• Education Level Required
  • Masters

Mission Driven Research is an Equal Opportunity Employer including disability/veterans. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity national origin disability or status as a protected veteran. If you are interested in applying for employment with Mission Driven Research and need special assistance or an accommodation to use our website please contact us by email () or by phone by calling . When contacting us please provide your contact information and state the nature of your accessibility issue.

Required Experience:

IC