Building AI systems where integrity matters more than imitation — for defense and public-sector missions.
Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Government IL5
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Your first year ends with deployed models operating inside IL5-authorized environments, processing real mission data under compliance frameworks most engineers never touch. You will own the full loop: pretraining on sensitive-domain corpora, fine-tuning against adversarial feedback, aligning outputs with strict operational constraints, and hardening inference pipelines to meet government security benchmarks. This is applied research that ships — not demos, not whitepapers — but hardened capabilities running on air-gapped Azure infrastructure and feeding decisions where failure carries consequences beyond a retry.
What they're looking for
- 5+ years building and deploying ML systems in production, with deep fluency in Python and at least one major cloud (Azure essential; AWS or GCP additive)
- Experience operating within IL4/IL5, FedRAMP High, or equivalent regulated government environments — you understand ATO processes, encryption at rest and in transit, and audit logging from hard-won practice
- Hands-on work with large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, and vector databases — you can discuss the tradeoffs between chunking strategies and recall latency without reaching for a slide deck
- Comfortable on-site in the San Francisco or South Bay Area five days a week, collaborating directly with a small, senior team where your voice shapes architecture and your code touches production within weeks
- Ability to hold a U.S. security clearance or active eligibility — you treat compartmented data with the discipline it demands