AI/ML Engineer

About Agile Defense   At Agile Defense we know that action defines the outcome and new challenges require new solutions. That’s why we always look to the future and embrace change with an unmovable spirit and the courage to build for what comes next.   Our vision is to bring adaptive innovation to support our nation's most important missions through the seamless integration of advanced technologies, elite minds, and unparalleled agility—leveraging a foundation of speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect our nation’s vital interests.
Requisition #: 1921 Job Title: SME AI/ML Engineer Location: Fort Meade, MD | Onsite Clearance Level: TS/SCI w/ Polygraph, Must Have Clearance to Start  

Job Description

Ready for a challenge that puts you at the center of AI innovation for cyber operations? Are you an experienced AI/ML engineer who thrives in a fast-paced environment, enjoys turning research and prototypes into real mission capability, and wants to help shape how AI is built and delivered across a national mission?

Our team is standing up an AI Enterprise capability — the central hub that mission teams turn to when they want to move an AI solution from prototype to a secure, governed, enterprise-scale service. As a Senior AI/ML Engineer on this team, you will design and integrate the models, agents, and AI workflows that run on that platform, with significant, visible impact on the mission.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Provide embedded operations support, capability integration, and rapid prototyping for AI/ML-enabled tools in support of our customer. Design and integrate LLM/agent orchestration workflows using agentic frameworks such as LangGraph, Agno, and the NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit.
• Tune model gateway routing logic to select, evaluate, and optimize across multiple frontier and open-weight models for cost, performance, and mission fit.
• Develop and integrate RAG pipelines, vector databases, and memory services to give agents access to mission knowledge and context.
• Implement MCP (Model Context Protocol)-based tool-broker integrations so agents can safely and securely access enterprise tools and data.
• Evaluate, benchmark, and tune models and agent behaviors; build automated evaluation pipelines to track quality, safety, and performance over time.
• Partner with data scientists and mission analysts to translate research and prototypes into production-grade AI capabilities for the command.
• Implement AI governance guardrails — content/safety filters, policy enforcement, and approval gates — for agentic workflows, and document model/agent architectures and evaluation results for reuse.