Senior Applied AI Engineer (AI)

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Company

An early-stage defense systems company developing and delivering advanced capabilities.

What you will do

• Define the AI tooling and integration roadmap with teams across engineering, supply chain, flight test, IT, programs, and cybersecurity.
• Architect and implement scalable, production-ready AI integrations for organization-wide use cases.
• Integrate AI tools with enterprise systems and data sources.
• Establish standards for model selection, prompt engineering, AI development, and governance.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and support strategic internal adoption.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software development experience with strong Python proficiency and experience in at least one static language such as C, C++, C#, or Java.
• 2+ years of applied AI experience owning an AI agent, LLM-powered workflow, or automation project from prototype through production.
• Experience with prompt engineering, fine-tuning, model evaluation, RAG architecture, vector databases, and embedding models.
• Strong stakeholder collaboration and requirements-gathering skills.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, another STEM field, or equivalent work experience.
• Access to export-controlled information may require U.S. Government security clearance, authorization, citizenship, or other eligibility requirements.

Nice to have

• 10+ years of software development experience.
• Experience deploying self-hosted AI platforms on Azure, AWS, or GCP.
• Experience using Model Context Protocol to integrate enterprise data sources with AI applications.
• Knowledge of automated containerized deployment.
• Experience building and leading small teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Significant ownership and direct impact in an early-stage environment.
• Cross-functional collaboration with specialized teams.
• Generous benefits package.
• Equal opportunity workplace with reasonable accommodations available throughout the hiring process.