Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Defense Unicorns is a veteran-founded company focused on transforming how the U.S. Department of War builds and delivers software. As a Forward Deployed AI Engineer, you will work closely with strategic customers to architect and deploy AI systems, ensuring rapid and secure software delivery to support warfighters.
Responsibilities
- Embed with strategic customers as a technical partner, working from problem discovery to solution implementation and customer adoption
- Architect, build, deploy, and operate agentic Generative AI systems: APIs, data processing ETL pipelines, integration layers, Retrieval Augmented Generation, and context engineering
- Work in cloud, on-prem, and edge/air-gapped environments to ensure software can run where the mission demands
- Prototype and deploy systems leveraging the core products and design patterns of the Unicorn Delivery Service (UDS); bring back insights from the field for continuous product improvement
- Scope, sequence, and lead delivery of solutions: define living roadmaps, set priorities, trade off speed vs quality vs scope, work across internal teams and customer stakeholders to drive clarity and remove blockers early
- Codify reusable patterns for mission environments: build tools, internal frameworks, playbooks so future deployments are faster, safer, and repeatable
- Act as the technical face to customer leadership: communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, build trust, manage expectations, and ensure successful scale and mission adoption. This is a customer-facing role
- Ability and interest to travel up as needed to client sites, but flexible based on personal preferences
Skills
- U.S. citizenship is required
- An active security clearance is preferred
- Clearance eligibility is required
- 3+ years of engineering or technical deployment experience (backend or full-stack), ideally in customer-facing or government environments (DoD, intelligence, public sector) or analogous high-assurance contexts
- Strong backend engineering skills: production-grade code in Python or TypeScript; deep familiarity with designing services, APIs, data pipelines, integrations, and backend frameworks
- Familiarity with LLMs or generative AI systems — be able to explain the fundamentals of Context Engineering and understand how model behavior connects to product/mission experience, and how AI capabilities integrate into larger system architectures
- Strong ability to work in ambiguity: define scope, sequence work, make trade-offs between speed, quality, and scope; remove blockers; deliver under pressure in dynamic mission-driven settings
- Excellent communication skills: able to translate complex technical details into clear messaging for non-technical stakeholders; work cross-functionally; build relationships with customers and internal teams
- Mission-oriented mindset. Have an understanding that our work is supporting the defense and freedom of the nation
- Experience with deploying applications on Kubernetes inside of air-gapped or secure environments
- Experience with Information Retrieval fundamentals including knowledge of keyword and vector based search, document parsing and chunking, document reranking, and SQL/NoSQL search engines
- Experience with developing, executing, and maintaining LLM evaluations
- Experience with open source LLM or SLM models (Llama3, Mixtral, Gemma, Phi) including inference frameworks, structured output, fine-tuning, and model architecture reconfiguration
Benefits
- Medical/Dental/Vision
- Premiums are 100% Company Paid
- Health Savings Account
- Life Insurance
- Disability Insurance
- 401k Retirement Plan
- Company Stock Options
- Home Office Budget
- We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
- Paid Parental Leave
- Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
- Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)
Company Overview
Defense Unicorns is a software startup that provides open-source software and AI capabilities for national security systems. It was founded in 2021, and is headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA, with a workforce of 51-200 employees. Its website is https://www.defenseunicorns.com.