Defense Unicorns is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem.
This role will focus on designing, building, and integrating agentic AI capabilities that allow AI models to interact with tools, access enterprise data, execute multi-step workflows, and support mission applications. The engineer will work across LLM integration, agent orchestration, APIs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the interfaces between AI applications and existing software platforms.
The ideal candidate is a hands-on software engineer with demonstrated experience building agentic AI applications. They should be comfortable entering an evolving architecture, learning unfamiliar systems quickly, working directly with commercial technology partners, and solving difficult problems involving integration, reliability, performance, and security.
This is not a traditional AI research or model development role. The focus is on building reliable, repeatable agentic capabilities that move beyond experimentation into working software in secure and classified environments.
Relevant agentic AI experience may be demonstrated through professional work, internships, research, open-source contributions, or independent projects.
Make trusted data available where AI needs it, while establishing the repeatable, secure data patterns required to move from experimentation to operational capability.
Full 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.
Remote - USA
$148,750—$201,250 USD
Defense 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.
We 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.
Defense 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.
Don’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.
At 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.
Defense Unicorns specializes in platform technologies that enable rapid and reliable delivery of capabilities across a wide range of mission and technology areas. We support open architecture platforms for secure mission systems that provide optionality for the end user, promote scalability, and allow for continuous identification and integration of new products and services while avoiding vendor lock. Our open approach creates partnership opportunities across the software ecosystem.
Our people are innovators, software engineers, and veterans with decades of experience delivering technology programs across DoD and the broader federal market.
Let's drive change together. Get in touch at hello@defenseunicorns.com
