{"id":1128104,"url":"https://alion.io/job/red-cell-partners-staff-applied-ml-engineer-federalnational-security","title":"Staff Applied ML Engineer, Federal/National Security","company":{"id":3121,"name":"Red Cell Partners","domain":"redcellpartners.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/red-cell-partners","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"is_intermediary":true,"ats_vendor":"Greenhouse","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Washington, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":180000,"max":240000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":240000},"salary_estimate":null,"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":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Fine-tuning","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Synthetic Data","optional":false},{"name":"Tool Use","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-22T21:08:42Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-22","last_verified_at":"2026-09-23T18:19:12Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"About Us\nRed Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.\nAbout the Role\nRed Cell Federal is hiring a Staff Applied ML Engineer to build and deploy production AI systems for federal and national security missions.\nYou'll work across LLMs, model fine-tuning and adaptation, agentic systems, RAG, evaluation, and inference, helping turn rapidly evolving AI capabilities into reliable software that operates in real mission environments.\nThis isn't a pure research role, and it isn't an ML infrastructure role removed from users. You'll work alongside Forward Deployed and Software Engineers, occasionally directly with customers, to understand operational problems and determine how models, data, agents, and software can solve them.\nRed Cell Federal's platform is being designed to support interchangeable models, including specialized smaller models for edge use cases, and to operate across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments.\nWhat You'll Do\nBuild production LLM-powered applications, AI agents, and agentic workflows\nDevelop and own model evaluation, fine-tuning, adaptation, and experimentation pipelines\nDetermine when to use prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, specialized models, or combinations of these approaches\nBuild rigorous eval systems for model and agent quality, reliability, tool use, and task completion\nDevelop retrieval and context systems across structured and unstructured mission data\nOptimize models and inference for production environments\nDeploy and improve models based on real-world performance and user feedback\nPartner with FDEs and customers to translate mission requirements into production AI capabilities\nTurn solutions developed for individual deployments into reusable platform capabilities\nWhat We're Looking For\nSignificant experience building ML or AI systems and deploying in production\nHands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models\nDeep expertise in several of the following:\nLLM fine-tuning / model adaptation\nModel evaluation\nRAG and retrieval systems\nAgentic systems and tool use\nModel serving / inference\nEmbeddings and knowledge retrieval\nSynthetic data\nGuardrails and AI reliability\nAbility to move comfortably between ML experimentation and production engineering\nAbility to operate independently against ambiguous technical problems\nInterest in working close to users and seeing how AI performs against real operational workflows\nWhy This Role\nThe challenge here isn't proving that an LLM can perform a task. It's figuring out how to make AI reliable enough to use in production, measurable enough to know when it fails, adaptable enough to improve quickly, and practical enough to operate within real national security environments.\nRed Cell Federal is focused on that \"agentic last mile\": operationalizing and deploying AI against mission requirements rather than stopping at decision support or prototypes.\nIf you want to work deeply on the models and stay close enough to the problem to see whether what you built actually works, let's talk!\nClearance / Eligibility\nBecause this role supports federal and national-security customers, U.S. citizenship is required with an Active Secret or Top-Secret Security Clearance.\nLocation\nWashington, DC / Northern Virginia preferred. This role may require regular customer-facing work, including onsite meetings, secure-facility work, or travel depending on program needs.\nSalary Range: $180,000-240,000 + bonus + equity. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.\n#LI-RCP \nOur Red Cell Partners Benefits (may differ for each incubation):\nFor full-time roles\nCareer track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows \n100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.\nPaid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.\nUnlimited PTO, with management approval.\nOpportunities for professional development and continued learning.\nOptional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.\nMental health benefits are available through Tara Mind. \nCost effective GLP-1 solutions available through Crux. \nWe’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.\nApplicant Data Disclosure \nBy submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC (\"Red Cell\") 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: \nManaging and administering your application throughout the hiring process; \nVerifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases; \nIdentifying 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. \nApplications 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 . \nRed Cell 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 Red Cell's data retention policies.\nFor more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and Applicant Privacy Notice.","description_format":"text","description_chars":6694,"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","Equity","Professional development","Unlimited PTO"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["National Security","Homeland Security","Venture Capital"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-22T23:03:01Z"}],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":0,"expected_fill_days":57,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-09-23T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":240000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/red-cell-partners-staff-applied-ml-engineer-federalnational-security","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/red-cell-partners-staff-applied-ml-engineer-federalnational-security.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-23T21:48:23Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers"}}