Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Government (IL5)

About the role

San Francisco / Los Altos, in-person 5 days a week, occasional travel to customer sites * Reports to the CTO * $200K to $260K base + equity

About the role

You will make the HLM run on Azure OpenAI inside a Department of Defense/War Impact Level 5 (IL5) boundary, and prove it performs as well there as it does commercially.

What you'll do

• Serve the models. Stand up Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Speech in Azure Government, and tune them for quality, latency, and cost.
• Port the pipelines. Move our RAG and HLM pipelines onto Azure Government services, with nothing leaving the boundary.
• Prove it works. Build evals for accuracy, grounding, and refusals, and report results to the customer.
• Own provenance. Model versions, prompts, approved images, and data lineage, documented for the ATO.
• Bring voice. Run Voice Capture on Azure AI Speech inside IL5.
• Secure retrieval. Build access control and audit logging with our full stack engineer.

What we're looking for

• U.S. citizenship is required. This role supports U.S. government contracts that require it.
• Hands-on experience deploying ML or LLM systems in a DoD IL5 environment (Azure Government preferred).
• 7+ years in ML or applied AI, owning models that serve real traffic.
• Deep experience with Azure OpenAI or similar hosted models, RAG, vector search (such as Azure AI Search), and evals.
• Comfortable in disconnected or tightly restricted environments where you cannot pip install your way out of a problem.
• Able to pass a U.S. government background investigation. An active clearance is a plus.

Bonus

• Speech and audio ML (ASR, voice synthesis).
• Fine-tuning models on Azure OpenAI or Azure Machine Learning.
• Iron Bank / Platform One container pipelines.

Apply with

• An ML system you deployed in IL5: the models, the serving stack, and how you evaluated it.
• Nothing classified or CUI.
• Papers or repos welcome.

How we hire

• We hire for a growth mindset: outcomes over output, experiments by default, and moving the metric that matters.
• Location: in-person, 5 days a week, across our San Francisco and Los Altos offices.

Pay and benefits

The expected base compensation for this position is below. Our total compensation package for full-time employees includes equity and a comprehensive benefits package.

Annual Salary $200,000—$260,000 USD