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Staff Applied ML Engineer, Federal/National Security

$180,000–$240,000Remote, hiring in Washington, DCStaff

View posting at Red Cell Partners

About the job

Staff Applied ML Engineer responsible for building and deploying production AI systems for federal and national security missions across LLMs, agents, retrieval, evaluation, fine-tuning, and inference.

Summary written from the posting.

What you’ll do

  • Build production LLM applications, AI agents, and agentic workflows
  • Own model evaluation, fine-tuning, adaptation, and experimentation pipelines
  • Develop retrieval, context, and rigorous evaluation systems for mission data
  • Optimize and deploy models for production environments

What you’ll bring

  • Significant experience building and deploying ML or AI systems in production
  • Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models
  • Deep expertise in multiple areas including fine-tuning, evaluation, RAG, agents, inference, embeddings, synthetic data, or AI reliability
  • Ability to move between ML experimentation and production engineering

Technologies

LLMs · RAG · model fine-tuning · agentic systems · model evaluation · model serving · inference · embeddings · synthetic data · guardrails

About Red Cell Partners

Venture studio building and scaling technology companies in defense, healthcare, and cyber with operational support and co-founder partnership model.

Private Late · 100–200 people

Pay and conditions

Posted pay
$180,000–$240,000
Pay details

Salary Range: $180,000-240,000 + bonus + equity. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

Location
Washington, DC
Work arrangement
Remote

The work, as we read it

Kind of work
Builds what the customer runs

Our reading of the posting, not the employer’s words.

How this compares

The middle of this range is $210,000, above the $196,000 median for the 1,768 US FDE postings that state one. Half of those sit between $162,000 and $230,000.