Software Engineer (SWE), Level 3 D.26.0236 with Security Clearance

Applicants must already hold a TS/SCI clearance with a current Full Scope Polygraph before applying. We are not sponsoring or processing clearances for this position. Candidates who are seeking to obtain a clearance do not meet the minimum requirements.

Salary Range: $260k-$285k per year with an additional $65k-$71k in immediately vested company 401(k) contributions Description: As a senior Applied AI Engineer, you will lead forward-deployed work with a mission customer from the first conversation through production and set the technical direction for the agents your team builds. You will mentor engineers who are newer to applied AI and help define how our team develops software with AI, including the review standards and validation layers that let us put autonomous coding agents to work on mission code. This role suits an experienced engineer who wants to shape how AI is fielded across operations and grow into project leadership.

Responsibilities

• Lead forward-deployed engagements with operations customers: elicit requirements from operators and analysts, identify the workflows where AI saves the most time, and deliver solutions from prototype to production.
• Architect and build agentic systems in Python that connect LLMs, MCP servers, Skills, and subagents to mission data sources and existing operational tools.
• Design guardrails for autonomous agents, including scoped permissions, human approval gates, and audit logging, so agents can act on operational systems safely.
• Build evaluation suites with mission users that measure the accuracy, reliability, and failure modes of AI capabilities, and use the results to decide when a capability is ready to field.
• Evaluate new models, frameworks, and AI design patterns, both frontier and open-weight, for fit against mission problems, and brief findings and tradeoffs to technical and government leadership.
• Use AI coding agents (e.g., Claude Code) in daily development, and help define team standards for reviewing, testing, and validating AI-generated code.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing, and lead technical design discussions for your project area.
• Communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs to project leads and government stakeholders.

Skills Requirements

• Extensive professional software engineering experience with advanced Python proficiency, including production services, APIs, and data pipelines that users depend on.
• Experience building LLM applications or agentic systems that use tool/function calling, structured outputs, context management, and multi-step workflows.
• Experience working directly with end users or mission customers to turn ambiguous operational problems into delivered software.
• Experience designing tests, evaluations, or validation layers for AI or other non-deterministic systems.
• Experience using AI coding assistants or agents (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Copilot) for code generation, refactoring, and debugging, with the review discipline to own and explain everything they produce.
• Technical leadership experience, such as serving as tech lead, leading design decisions, or mentoring engineers.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD pipelines (GitLab preferred), Docker/Kubernetes, and Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence).
• Strong written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical audiences. Nice to Haves:
• Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP), Skills, subagents, or multi-agent orchestration frameworks such as PydanticAI or LangGraph.
• Experience securing LLM applications against prompt injection, data leakage, and over-permissioned tool access.
• Experience with retrieval systems (RAG, vector databases, Elasticsearch).
• Experience building spec-driven or autonomous development pipelines with AI coding agents.
• Prior forward-deployed or embedded customer-facing engineering experience.
• Experience with production CNO capabilities and operations, or knowledge of end-to-end SIGINT collection and analysis systems.

YOE Requirement: 12 yrs., B.S. in a technical discipline or 4 additional yrs. in place of B.S.