Senior AI​/ML Engineer

Performance Drone Works (PDW) is building the next generation of tactical robotic systems used across defense, national security, and public safety missions. We are building a new center of engineering excellence to design our new category of tactical robotic systems and the industrial capacity to deliver them, bringing decisive airpower into the hands of every operator. We are not here to make promises;

we are here to deliver real systems with real capabilities for real missions. You will join a team of operators, engineers, and builders who solve hard problems with humility and focus. We design and produce multi-mission aerial systems that operators trust to perform in real-world conditions, reliably, repeatedly, and  approach is grounded in operator-centered design, rapid iteration from field use, and U.S.

-based manufacturing. We operate by a clear set of values:
Mission First, Aim Farther, Own It, Win Together. This is how we build advantage and how we help protect our service members, our communities, and our country. Now, we’re entering a new phase of growth and are looking for a Senior AI/ML Engineer to serve as PDW's senior technical leader for enterprise AI—helping define our AI strategy, architecture, and technical roadmap while remaining hands‑on in building and scaling the capabilities that put that vision into production.

• Serve as PDW's senior technical authority for enterprise AI/ML, partnering with technology leadership to shape the AI strategy, architecture, technical roadmap, engineering standards, and investment priorities—and taking hands‑on ownership of turning that direction into working capabilities.
• Design and implement AI orchestration and control capabilities including model routing, authentication and authorization, policy enforcement, observability, usage tracking, cost management, and auditability.
• Build production retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) solutions, including ingestion pipelines, chunking, embeddings, vector search, retrieval, reranking, and generation across structured and unstructured enterprise data.
• Develop AI agents and agentic workflows that securely interact with enterprise applications, APIs, data sources, and business processes while respecting underlying identity and authorization boundaries.
• Partner with Engineering, Manufacturing, IT, Cybersecurity, and business teams to identify high‑value AI opportunities, rapidly prototype solutions, evaluate technical feasibility, and transition successful concepts into production.
• Develop repeatable model evaluation and benchmarking frameworks to compare models and architectures based on quality, accuracy, latency, reliability, security, and cost using PDW‑specific workloads.
• Design, build, and operate production AI/ML applications, APIs, data pipelines, evaluation frameworks, and supporting infrastructure using modern software engineering, CI/CD, and MLOps practices.
• Evaluate and optimize AI workloads across SaaS, API, cloud, GPU, and internally hosted infrastructure, including opportunities for model optimization, fine‑tuning, quantization, and accelerated inference.
• Implement technical controls for AI security and governance, including data protection, access control, model and provider restrictions, guardrails, validation, human oversight, and protection against threats such as prompt injection and data leakage.
• Establish PDW's AI engineering discipline, including reusable patterns, reference architectures, development standards, documentation, and technical governance; mentor engineers and teams adopting AI; and continuously evaluate emerging technologies to recommend how PDW's AI strategy and architecture should evolve.

• 7+ years of progressive experience in software…