Member of Technical Staff

Location: DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia)
Company Stage of Funding: Seed / Early Growth
Office Type: Hybrid — 4 days/week onsite in McLean, VA with travel to client sites in Washington, D.C.
Salary: $175,000 – $230,000 + Competitive Equity
Visa: No visa sponsorship or transfers — U.S. Citizens / Green Card holders only
Travel: Local travel to government and client sites across Washington, D.C.; no cross-state travel required

Company Description

Our client is building AI infrastructure that combines decision intelligence, automation, and advanced AI systems to help organizations turn complex data into actionable insights and execution.

The company is an early-stage AI startup founded in 2025 with a small, highly technical team of approximately 4 employees and approximately $2M in funding.

The team is focused on building sophisticated AI systems that combine large language models, retrieval, multi-agent architectures, data pipelines, distributed systems, and machine learning infrastructure.

This is an opportunity to join a highly technical founding-stage organization where engineers work directly with U.S. Government partners to build AI systems addressing high-stakes problems involving fraud, waste, and abuse.

The role combines software engineering, AI/ML research, customer deployment, and mission-driven problem solving, with significant ownership over the architecture and implementation of production AI systems.

What You Will Do

• Build and deploy production-grade agentic AI systems for high-stakes U.S. Government missions
• Design and implement multi-agent systems using modern agent frameworks
• Build RAG pipelines that enable AI systems to reason over large and complex datasets
• Develop tool-calling agents capable of interacting with external systems and data sources
• Embed directly with federal agency partners to understand mission requirements and technical challenges
• Translate government mission requirements into working AI-powered technical systems
• Analyze large public and walled government databases to identify fraudulent contractors and suspicious activity
• Build data pipelines and infrastructure for processing complex government datasets
• Develop systems that can surface patterns, anomalies, and signals associated with fraud, waste, and abuse
• Work directly with government stakeholders and technical teams to iterate on deployed systems
• Travel locally to government sites including federal agencies and the Pentagon
• Work closely with the founding team and Chief AI Officer on high-priority technical initiatives
• Architect scalable AI/ML systems that can operate reliably in production environments
• Develop and maintain ML infrastructure supporting AI applications and agentic workflows
• Apply distributed systems principles to large-scale AI and data-processing workloads
• Experiment with reinforcement learning and other machine learning techniques where appropriate
• Own technical projects from research and prototyping through production deployment
• Investigate ambiguous technical and mission problems and determine practical engineering solutions
• Balance research experimentation with production engineering requirements
• Operate with extremely high ownership in a small, rapidly evolving startup environment
• Help shape the company's technical architecture and long-term AI platform strategy

Ideal Candidate Background

Experience Requirements

• 2–10 years of combined software engineering and AI/ML research experience
• Strong software engineering foundation with experience building production systems
• Experience building or deploying AI/ML systems in real-world environments
• Experience working with LLMs, RAG, agentic AI, or related modern AI technologies
• Experience owning technical projects from research or discovery through implementation
• Experience working with complex datasets and data-intensive systems
• Strong ability to operate independently in ambiguous technical environments
• Experience working in startups, research environments, or highly autonomous engineering teams strongly preferred
• Comfortable working directly with customers or mission partners on technical requirements
• U.S. work authorization required; candidates must be U.S. Citizens or Green Card holders

Technical Requirements

• Strong Python engineering experience
• Strong experience working with LLMs and modern AI systems
• Experience building RAG pipelines and retrieval systems
• Experience with multi-agent frameworks and agentic architectures
• Experience building tool-calling or autonomous AI systems
• Strong data pipeline and data-processing experience
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals
• Experience with ML infrastructure and production ML systems
• Understanding of reinforcement learning and modern machine learning techniques
• Experience designing scalable AI/ML architectures
• Ability to work with large, complex, and heterogeneous datasets
• Strong software engineering fundamentals including system design, debugging, testing, and deployment
• Ability to move between research experimentation and production implementation
• Experience building reliable systems for high-stakes or complex environments

Customer & Mission Requirements

• Strong ability to understand complex customer or mission requirements
• Comfortable embedding directly with government or enterprise partners
• Ability to translate ambiguous mission problems into technical solutions
• Strong analytical and investigative instincts
• Comfortable working with sensitive or complex datasets
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• Strong interest in solving real-world problems through AI
• Comfortable traveling locally to customer and government sites
• Ability to build trust with highly technical and mission-focused stakeholders

Soft Skills

• Extremely high ownership and accountability
• Strong first-principles problem-solving ability
• Highly analytical and intellectually curious
• Comfortable operating with limited structure
• Strong builder mentality
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Able to move quickly in a small startup environment
• Comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information
• Low-ego and collaborative working style
• Strong attention to technical detail
• Able to balance experimentation with production-quality engineering
• Comfortable taking responsibility for large technical problems
• Mission-oriented and motivated by meaningful real-world impact

Compensation & Benefits

• Base salary: $175,000 – $230,000
• Competitive equity package
• Opportunity to join an extremely early-stage AI company
• High ownership over advanced agentic AI systems
• Direct exposure to high-impact U.S. Government missions
• Opportunity to work on fraud, waste, and abuse detection
• Direct collaboration with founders and senior AI leadership
• Exposure to advanced LLM, RAG, multi-agent, distributed systems, and ML infrastructure challenges
• Opportunity to influence the technical architecture of a growing AI platform
• High-impact role with significant responsibility from day one

Why Join

This is an opportunity to join an extremely early-stage AI company working on one of the largest and most complex problems in government: identifying and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse.

You’ll build sophisticated AI systems that combine LLMs, RAG, multi-agent architectures, data pipelines, distributed systems, and machine learning infrastructure and deploy them directly into real government environments.

The role is not a traditional ML engineering position. It combines software engineering, AI research, customer deployment, data investigation, and mission-driven problem solving.

If you enjoy building cutting-edge AI systems, working directly with customers, solving ambiguous problems, and operating with exceptional ownership.