Applied AI Research Engineer

About the Role

We're building next-generation AI systems that help military planners explore, compare, and evaluate operational courses of action. Our work combines frontier language models, simulation, planning, and verification into human-in-the-loop decision-support systems for defense applications. As an Applied AI Research Engineer, you’ll focus on human machine teaming and agentic AI to build systems that allow warfighters, planners, analysts, and decision-makers to explore operational choices with speed, confidence, and control.

This role focuses on designing and building agentic AI systems - not chatbots. You'll develop multi-agent workflows, fine-tune and evaluate models, build retrieval pipelines, experiment with post-training techniques, and integrate AI with simulation and planning software. You'll work closely with AI researchers, software engineers, and defense experts to turn research ideas into production-ready capabilities. The goal is to make complex planning, wargaming, adjudication, and analysis workflows faster, more explainable, and more trustworthy.

An incomplete list of ongoing and near-term directions

• Human-machine teaming for AI-assisted course-of-action development, comparison, critique, refinement, and operational decision support
• Agentic planning systems that integrate language models with simulation, doctrine retrieval, external tools, structured outputs, and deterministic verification
• Adapting and optimizing foundation models through fine-tuning, post-training, distillation, reinforcement learning, and rigorous evaluation for planning and decision-support tasks
• Multi-agent AI systems for Red/Blue planning, control-cell support, adjudication, branch-and-sequel analysis, and collaborative planning workflows
• Building reliable AI systems using self-correction, structured reasoning, constraint-aware generation, verification, and robust tool use
• Learning from human expertise through planner feedback, preferences, approvals, synthetic data generation, and human-in-the-loop improvement
• Trustworthy AI for high-consequence applications, with an emphasis on explainability, provenance, traceability, auditability, uncertainty estimation, and model behavior analysis

What You’ll Do

• Design and build agentic AI systems for planning, decision support, and human-machine teaming
• Develop AI pipelines that integrate foundation models, retrieval, simulation, external tools, and deterministic software
• Design, run, and analyze experiments to evaluate model and agent performance, reliability, traceability, latency, cost, and user trust
• Fine-tune, distill, and evaluate foundation models for domain-specific planning, reasoning, and decision-support tasks
• Build datasets, retrieval pipelines, automated benchmarks, and experiment infrastructure to support continuous model improvement and reproducible research
• Partner with software engineers to transition research prototypes into scalable AI services
• Collaborate with domain experts to translate operational workflows into AI-enabled capabilities while ensuring AI outputs remain explainable, reviewable, and under human control

Must-have Credentials

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 3+ years building AI, machine learning, or applied research systems.
• Strong Python engineering skills.
• Experience with PyTorch and modern LLM tooling (Transformers, vLLM, Hugging Face, etc.).
• Experience building or deploying agentic AI systems, tool-calling workflows, or multi-step reasoning pipelines.
• Experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or serving language models.
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, or knowledge retrieval systems.
• Strong understanding of experiment design, benchmarking, and model evaluation.
• Ability to move quickly from research prototype to production-quality implementation.
• Eligible to obtain a U.S. security clearance.

Benefits

• Pay depends on experience, but we strive to be at the upper end of the salary range
• Health care plan with 100% premium coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
• 401k with 5% matching
• Paid Time Off (uncapped vacation, plus sick and public holidays)
• Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement
• Relocation assistance for qualifying employees

Wage Transparency - The salary range for this role is not a guarantee of compensation or salary, as the final offer amount may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, individual proficiency, skills, experience, and location.