Associate AI Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: Arlington, VA or Mt. Laurel, NJ

Compensation: $74,000 - $150,000 per year

Innovative Defense Technologies (IDT), provider of cutting‑edge cloud‑based integration, automated testing and data analysis for complex, mission‑critical systems in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), is seeking an Associate AI Engineer to be part of our Warfare Systems team and based out of our Arlington, VA or Mt. Laurel, NJ location.

The Associate AI Engineer will design and deliver engineering‑focused AI solutions that move beyond demos into reliable, mission‑relevant systems. This role is ideal for an early‑career engineer who is strong in Python, excited by LLMs and autonomous agents, and motivated to build end‑to‑end capabilities including MCP integrations, RAG pipelines, tool‑using agents, and production‑grade AI workflows.

• All applicants must be able to obtain/maintain an active Secret U.S. Security Clearance.
• This is an on‑site position requiring at least 3 days in office, based out of Arlington, VA or Mt. Laurel, NJ.

• Design and implement end‑to‑end agentic AI systems that support planning, reasoning, tool use, and multi‑step execution in real‑world environments. Build modular, testable components that move from prototype to operational capability.
• Develop integrations across LLMs, APIs, data sources, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) interfaces to enable intelligent agents to interact with external systems, retrieve context, and take action safely and reliably.
• Build and optimize Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines that connect models to live knowledge sources, structured data, and enterprise content to improve factual grounding, contextual relevance, and response quality.
• Create conversational systems and intelligent agents with memory, contextual awareness, adaptive decision‑making, and support for multi‑turn user and system interactions.
• Translate technical objectives into working pipelines, run experiments, evaluate agent behavior, and iterate on prompts, orchestration logic, retrieval quality, and system performance to improve reliability and usability.
• Gather, document, and validate technical and functional requirements from project artifacts, stakeholders, and mission needs to ensure feasibility, completeness, and alignment with operational goals.
• Work closely with engineers, technical leads, and mission stakeholders to integrate AI capabilities into broader software and system architectures. Participate in technical reviews, design discussions, and delivery planning.
• Contribute to testing, debugging, and performance optimization of AI‑enabled applications, including edge cases involving context management, retrieval failures, tool execution, and orchestration logic.
• Stay current on advances in LLMs, agent frameworks, orchestration methods, and applied AI engineering practices, and bring that knowledge into practical system design and implementation.
• Clearly document architectures, workflows, assumptions, and implementation decisions so that solutions are maintainable, explainable, and transferable across teams.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field, or equivalent full‑time professional experience.
• 0–0 years of full‑time professional experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, AI engineering, or related technical roles.
• Ability to travel up to 10% of the time as needed.
• Proficiency in Python, including experience with core libraries such as Num Py and Pandas.
• Experience building software with one or more modern AI/ML frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensor Flow, Lang Chain, Lang Graph, Semantic Kernel, or Auto Gen.
• Familiarity with Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, agent orchestration, or conversational AI systems.
• Familiarity with retrieval systems, vector databases, embeddings, or RAG‑based application design.
• Understanding of software engineering fundamentals, including version control, testing, debugging, and writing…