ML Engineer, Retrieval & Grounded Generation

DEFCON AI is an insights company that uses artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering to optimize complex systems and improve resilience. The ML Engineer, Retrieval & Grounded Generation will build scalable retrieval and generation infrastructure, integrate language models with source-grounded citations, and own model serving, versioning, rollback, and telemetry for a secure production platform.

Responsibilities:

• Implement embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval across a large, provenance-tracked evidence base
• Integrate language models so generated text is bound to cited source records; test for citation failures rather than assuming them away
• Design prompts and output schemas
• Own model packaging, versioning, serving, and rollback
• Instrument telemetry for retrieval and generation quality, recommendation/version attribution, overrides, abstentions, grounding failures, latency, throughput, and measurement events defined with Model Test
• Provide bounded model assistance for difficult narrative extraction where deterministic processing is insufficient, with every output tied to its source passage
• Supply the recorded rule context to every model-assisted step, so each output carries the exact rule versions and ordered context it received
• Maintain a modular in-boundary serving path, self-hosted or managed, alongside the primary managed inference service, so the platform does not depend on one provider’s availability or approval