• Maintain a modular in-boundary serving path, self-hosted or managed, alongside the primary managed inference service, so the platform does not depend on one provider’s availability or approval

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience, including a production or near-production retrieval-augmented (RAG) system you built yourself

• Ability to speak in detail to your retrieval design, which vector store you used and why, how you tested grounding, what citation failures looked like in practice, and how rollback worked

• Strong Python, with hands-on experience in embeddings and vector retrieval at scale

• Clarity on what actually shipped in past work — prototype, proposal, or deployed code — since that distinction matters more here than the title on a resume

• US Citizenship Required

• Active US Secret clearance required to start.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience deploying models into restricted or air-gapped environments

• Self-hosted or open-weight model operation

• Fine-tuning, adapters, or custom embeddings

• Federal DevSecOps, RMF, ATO, or DoW cloud environment experience

• Active Top Secret clearance

What Success Looks Like

• Generated explanations that assert no more than the sources support, with the citation path intact and citation failures tested rather than assumed away

• A retrieval system that performs at scale on a large, provenance-tracked evidence base

• Model rollback that works when it's needed, with telemetry complete enough that measurement does not require manual reconstruction

What We Offer

• A fully remote, results-based environment

• Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package

• 100% employer paid, comprehensive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family

• Unlimited PTO, with your manager's approval

• Flexible work environment where you manage your work day

• 14 weeks of fully-paid parental leave

Salary Range: $165,000–$200,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

Applicant Data Disclosure

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Defcon AI uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:

• Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;
• Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;
• Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories.

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact [email protected].

Defcon AI requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Defcon AI's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and

Applicant Privacy Notice

.