{"id":1472536,"url":"https://alion.io/job/defense-unicorns-aiagentic-engineer","title":"Senior Platform Engineer (FedD239)","company":{"id":8737,"name":"Defense Unicorns","domain":"defenseunicorns.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/defense-unicorns","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":75,"open_postings":5,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.8,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":67,"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"DevOps","role_family":"DevOps","seniority":"senior","employment_type":null,"work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":127000,"max_usd":276000,"period":"year","method":"role_country_seniority_unknown","sample_n":2986},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Multi-Agent Systems","optional":false},{"name":"OpenShift","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Anthropic","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"Confluence","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"GitLab","optional":true},{"name":"GitOps","optional":true},{"name":"Helm","optional":true},{"name":"Human-in-the-Loop","optional":true},{"name":"Jira","optional":true},{"name":"Knowledge Graph","optional":true},{"name":"Kustomize","optional":true},{"name":"LangChain","optional":true},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":true},{"name":"LlamaIndex","optional":true},{"name":"NVIDIA NeMo","optional":true},{"name":"NVIDIA NIM","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"Pulumi","optional":true},{"name":"Semantic Kernel","optional":true},{"name":"Terraform","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-29T15:36:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-30","last_verified_at":"2026-10-02T17:49:51Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":3,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":3},"description":"Senior Platform Engineer\nAI Engineering | Forward Deployed Engineering\nRole Description\nDefense Unicorns is seeking a senior AI Agentic Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem.\nThis role will focus on designing, integrating, and operationalizing AI agents and agentic workflows within a secure enterprise environment. The engineer will work across large language models, agent frameworks, enterprise data, APIs, developer tooling, and platform services to turn AI capabilities into reliable, mission-relevant workflows.\nThe ideal candidate is a hands-on engineer who understands both the capabilities and limitations of modern AI systems and can rapidly translate emerging technologies into working solutions. They should be comfortable experimenting with new models and agent frameworks, integrating agents with enterprise systems and tools, evaluating performance and reliability, and working alongside platform engineers and commercial technology partners.\nThis is not a research-only role. The focus is on moving from AI concepts and prototypes to secure, useful, repeatable agentic capabilities that can operate in production environments.\nResponsibilities\nDesign, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern LLM and agentic technologies.\nDevelop agent capabilities that interact with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, developer tools, and mission systems.\nIntegrate models, agents, tools, and enterprise data into secure workflows that can be deployed in controlled and classified environments.\nWork with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, MCP, and related technologies.\nDevelop mechanisms for agents to securely discover, access, reason over, and act upon approved enterprise data and services.\nPrototype and rapidly evaluate emerging models, agent frameworks, and AI capabilities to determine where they can create measurable mission or engineering value.\nDevelop evaluation and testing frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and task completion.\nImplement guardrails and policy controls governing agent behavior, tool access, data access, and human approval points.\nIntegrate agentic capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows to support repeatable development, testing, deployment, and lifecycle management.\nCollaborate with platform engineers to operationalize AI workloads within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.\nWork with commercial AI and technology partners to integrate their capabilities into the broader engineering ecosystem.\nTroubleshoot issues across models, agent frameworks, APIs, data sources, networking, identity, and infrastructure.\nDevelop reusable patterns for agent deployment, configuration, observability, evaluation, and lifecycle management.\nDocument architectures, integration patterns, agent specifications, evaluation results, and operational procedures.\nIdentify recurring AI engineering challenges that can be standardized, automated, or productized into reusable capabilities.\nStay current with rapidly evolving agentic AI technologies and assess their applicability to secure government environments.\nMinimum Experience and Qualifications\nActive TS/SCI clearance.\nHands-on experience building applications or systems using large language models and generative AI.\nExperience designing and implementing AI agents or agentic workflows.\nStrong programming experience in Python and/or another modern programming language.\nExperience integrating AI systems with APIs, enterprise applications, databases, and external tools.\nExperience with one or more agent frameworks or orchestration approaches.\nWorking knowledge of RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, and prompt engineering.\nExperience developing software in a Git-based, automated CI/CD environment.\nAbility to rapidly prototype, test, troubleshoot, and iterate in ambiguous environments.\nStrong understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including testing, version control, APIs, debugging, and system design.\nAbility to work effectively alongside platform engineers, government personnel, and multiple technology vendors.\nPreferred Experience and Qualifications\nExperience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) and tool-based agent architectures.\nExperience with multi-agent systems and agent orchestration.\nExperience with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, NVIDIA, or comparable foundation model ecosystems.\nExperience with NVIDIA NIM, NeMo, or similar AI inference/model-serving technologies.\nExperience with Red Hat OpenShift AI or Kubernetes-based AI platforms.\nExperience with agent evaluation and observability frameworks.\nExperience implementing AI guardrails, policy enforcement, human-in-the-loop workflows, or AI safety controls.\nExperience with LangGraph, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or comparable frameworks.\nExperience with RAG pipelines, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and enterprise search.\nExperience deploying AI systems in Secret or TS/SCI environments.\nExperience with disconnected or air-gapped AI environments.\nExperience integrating AI into developer/DevSecOps workflows.\nFamiliarity with GitLab, Jira, Confluence, Xacta, or similar enterprise engineering and compliance tools.\nExperience working with GPUs, model serving, inference optimization, or AI infrastructure.\nFamiliarity with UDS, Zarf, Pepr, Iron Bank, or similar secure software delivery technologies.\nExperience taking AI prototypes into repeatable, production-ready capabilities.\nAbility to evaluate new AI technologies quickly and make pragmatic build/buy/integrate decisions.\nWhat Success Looks Like\nAgentic capabilities move from prototype to mission use quickly, with working agents integrated into real government workflows rather than remaining isolated demos.\nAgents reliably connect to approved enterprise data, tools, and services, with appropriate identity, permissions, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop controls.\nAI capabilities are measurable and trustworthy, with repeatable evaluation methods for accuracy, reliability, task completion, security, and operational performance.\nReusable agent patterns emerge, reducing the engineering required to build and deploy the next agent or AI-enabled workflow.\nAI integrates cleanly with the broader platform architecture, working effectively across the data, DevSecOps, Kubernetes/OpenShift, model, and application layers rather than creating another technology silo.\nThe engineer becomes a trusted AI technical advisor to the Mission Hero, proactively identifying where agentic technology can create mission value-and equally important, where AI is not the right solution.\nFull compensation packages are based on candidate experience. Compensation ranges are established using national benchmarking data and apply across all geographic locations within the United States. \nRemote - USA\n$148,750—$201,250 USD\nWho We Are\nDefense Unicorns delivers mission value by streamlining software delivery so our customers can focus on the most important challenges. We share a vision of freedom and security for the advancement of progress and innovation. Our commitment to this vision, and to our mission-driven customers, means a commitment to speed, user experience and optionality, without compromising security. Our team is composed of innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across the federal market.\nWhat We Do\nWe create and deliver secure solutions for continuous software integration and delivery. Defense Unicorns consolidates the best practices for security pipelines, testing, and deployment automation in order to meet the high security requirements valued by mission owners. Our solutions are agnostic by design and we believe that growing a robust ecosystem of secure, cloud-native software solutions can help enterprise customers inside and outside the federal market buy and integrate software more easily.\nWho We Serve\nDefense Unicorns’ customers are mission-focused leaders across public and private enterprises. We proudly support defense and civil agencies across the U.S. government and we work closely with the creators of leading-edge software solutions to deliver value to the mission-owner by improving the security and consumability of commercial software products.\nWhat We Work On\nKubernetes\nCloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)\nInfrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)\nContinuous Delivery and automation tooling\nGitOps\nContainers\nCNCF projects and open source products and packages\nHelm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping\nBuilding and improving security delivery\nBuilding Kubernetes and cloud native applications\nBenefits Our Unicorns Enjoy\nHealth:\nMedical/Dental/Vision\nPremiums are 100% Company Paid\nHealth Savings Account\nLife Insurance\nDisability Insurance\nFinancial:\n401k Retirement Plan\nCompany Stock Options\nHome Office Budget\nLeave:\nWe 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\nPaid Parental Leave\nLearning:\nReimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions\nConferences (travel, lodging, and fees)\nDon’t have all the preferred experience or qualifications? Studies show that underrepresented groups like women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs if they don't meet every requirement listed. \nAt Defense Unicorns, we're committed to diversity. If you're enthusiastic about the role but don't match every criteria, we encourage you to apply. You could be the perfect fit for this or another role! Defense Unicorns is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, national origin, veteran status, genetic information, union status and/or beliefs, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.\nCCPA DISCLOSURE","description_format":"text","description_chars":10112,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":true,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Flexible time off","Home office","Life insurance","Parental leave","Retirement plans","Stock options"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Military","Naval Systems"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-29T16:59:08Z"}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":2,"expected_fill_days":67,"reasons":["conf:4","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-02T05:45:00Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/defense-unicorns-aiagentic-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/defense-unicorns-aiagentic-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-03T04:23:15Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":4656,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":344,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-04T00:00:00Z"}}}