Staff Applied ML Engineer (Federal/National Security)

Location: Remote within the USA; Washington, DC/Northern Virginia preferred. The role may require regular customer-facing work, onsite meetings, secure-facility work, or travel depending on program needs.

Salary: $180,000–$240,000 annually, plus bonus and equity.

Company

hirify.global is an incubation firm building and investing in technology-led companies across healthcare, cyber, and national security.

What you will do

• Build production LLM-powered applications, AI agents, and agentic workflows.
• Develop model evaluation, fine-tuning, adaptation, experimentation, retrieval, and context pipelines.
• Choose between prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, specialized models, or combined approaches for mission requirements.
• Build evaluation systems for model and agent quality, reliability, tool use, and task completion.
• Optimize and deploy models across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments using real-world performance and user feedback.
• Partner with forward-deployed engineers, software engineers, and customers to turn deployments into reusable platform capabilities.

Requirements

• Significant experience building and deploying production ML or AI systems.
• Hands-on experience with modern LLMs and foundation models.
• Deep expertise in several areas including LLM fine-tuning, model evaluation, RAG, agentic systems, model serving, embeddings, synthetic data, guardrails, or AI reliability.
• Ability to move between ML experimentation and production engineering and work independently on ambiguous technical problems.
• U.S. citizenship and an active Secret or Top Secret security clearance are required.
• Interest in working directly with users and operational workflows.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting federal or national security missions.
• Experience deploying AI systems in secure facilities or edge environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with a career track and opportunities for advancement.
• Employer-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and families.
• Fourteen weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave.
• Unlimited PTO with management approval.
• Professional development opportunities, optional 401(k), FSA, equity incentives, and mental health benefits.