Senior Platform Engineer (FedD239)

The posting, as Defense Unicorns wrote it

Senior Platform Engineer

AI Engineering | Forward Deployed Engineering

Role Description

Defense Unicorns is seeking a senior AI Agentic Engineer to embed with a government team and its technology partners building an emerging AI-powered engineering ecosystem.

This role will focus on designing, integrating, and operationalizing AI agents and agentic workflows within a secure enterprise environment. The engineer will work across large language models, agent frameworks, enterprise data, APIs, developer tooling, and platform services to turn AI capabilities into reliable, mission-relevant workflows.

The ideal candidate is a hands-on engineer who understands both the capabilities and limitations of modern AI systems and can rapidly translate emerging technologies into working solutions. They should be comfortable experimenting with new models and agent frameworks, integrating agents with enterprise systems and tools, evaluating performance and reliability, and working alongside platform engineers and commercial technology partners.

This is not a research-only role. The focus is on moving from AI concepts and prototypes to secure, useful, repeatable agentic capabilities that can operate in production environments.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and integrate AI agents and multi-agent workflows using modern LLM and agentic technologies.
• Develop agent capabilities that interact with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, developer tools, and mission systems.
• Integrate models, agents, tools, and enterprise data into secure workflows that can be deployed in controlled and classified environments.
• Work with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, tool/function calling, structured outputs, MCP, and related technologies.
• Develop mechanisms for agents to securely discover, access, reason over, and act upon approved enterprise data and services.
• Prototype and rapidly evaluate emerging models, agent frameworks, and AI capabilities to determine where they can create measurable mission or engineering value.
• Develop evaluation and testing frameworks for agent accuracy, reliability, safety, latency, cost, and task completion.
• Implement guardrails and policy controls governing agent behavior, tool access, data access, and human approval points.
• Integrate agentic capabilities with CI/CD and DevSecOps workflows to support repeatable development, testing, deployment, and lifecycle management.
• Collaborate with platform engineers to operationalize AI workloads within Kubernetes/OpenShift environments.
• Work with commercial AI and technology partners to integrate their capabilities into the broader engineering ecosystem.
• Troubleshoot issues across models, agent frameworks, APIs, data sources, networking, identity, and infrastructure.
• Develop reusable patterns for agent deployment, configuration, observability, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Document architectures, integration patterns, agent specifications

[…]
oudly 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.

What We Work On

• Kubernetes
• Cloud Environments (AWS/GCP and Azure)
• Infrastructure-as-code (like Terraform/Pulumi)
• Continuous Delivery and automation tooling
• GitOps
• Containers
• CNCF projects and open source products and packages
• Helm/Kustomize-Value Stream Mapping
• Building and improving security delivery
• Building Kubernetes and cloud native applications

Benefits Our Unicorns Enjoy

Health

• Medical/Dental/Vision
• Premiums are 100% Company Paid
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance
• Disability Insurance

Financial

• 401k Retirement Plan
• Company Stock Options
• Home Office Budget

Leave

• We offer all full-time Unicorns Flexible Time Off (FTO) plus all Federal Holidays, one week for Thanksgiving, and two weeks for Christmas and New Year’s
• Paid Parental Leave

Learning

• Reimbursement for approved trainings/subscriptions
• Conferences (travel, lodging, and fees)

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.

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