Staff Applied ML Engineer, Federal/National Security

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in technology-led companies across healthcare, cyber, and national security. Red Cell Federal is hiring a Staff Applied ML Engineer to build and deploy production AI systems for federal and national security missions, with a focus on LLMs, evaluation, fine-tuning, retrieval, inference, and operationalizing AI for real-world environments.

Responsibilities:

• Build productionLLM-powered applications, AI agents, and agentic workflows
• Develop and own model evaluation, fine-tuning, adaptation, and experimentation pipelines
• Determine when to use prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, specialized models, or combinations of these approaches
• Build rigorous eval systems for model and agent quality, reliability, tool use, and task completion
• Develop retrieval and context systems across structured and unstructured mission data
• Optimize models and inference for production environments
• Deploy and improve models based on real-world performance and user feedback
• Partner with FDEs and customers to translate mission requirements into production AI capabilities
• Turn solutions developed for individual deployments into reusable platform capabilities

Requirements:

• • Significant experience building ML or AI systems and deploying in production
• • Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models
• • Deep expertise in several of the following:

• LLM fine-tuning / model adaptation
• Model evaluation
• RAG and retrieval systems
• Agentic systems and tool use
• Model serving / inference
• Embeddings and knowledge retrieval
• Synthetic data
• Guardrails and AI reliability

• • Ability to move comfortably between ML experimentation and production engineering
• • Ability to operate independently against ambiguous technical problems
• • Interest in working close to users and seeing how AI performs against real operational workflows
• Because this role supports federal and national-security customers, U.S. citizenship is required with an Active Secret or Top-Secret Security Clearance
• This role may require regular customer-facing work, including onsite meetings, secure-facility work, or travel depending on program needs
• Washington, DC / Northern Virginia preferred