AI Engineer

Job description

COMPANY OVERVIEW Prepare first. Decide first. Win first. At Pytho, we're on a mission to ensure warfighters are prepared for every challenge they face. We are committed to assembling a world-class team of exceptional problem solvers, combining expert engineering talent with deep experience in National Security. We build AI for the most important problem in defense — making sure the force is ready to fight. Our software is deployed and in use with DoW partners today. THE OPPORTUNITY We're building out our AI Engineering Team. This is a chance to join at the earliest stage of a company where the engineering problems are genuinely hard — planning under uncertainty, multi-agent coordination, simulation, reinforcement learning — and the work is deployed in environments where the output actually matters. You will work across the full ML lifecycle — transforming messy, real-world data into production-grade models deployed in high-stakes environments. You'll ship fast, work directly with the founders, and have outsized influence on the technical direction of the company. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AI/ML Development: Design, train, fine-tune, and deploy ML models to solve real-world operational problems. Own the lifecycle from data exploration and feature engineering to evaluation and production monitoring. Data & Systems Engineering: Build scalable data pipelines for structured and unstructured data (text, imagery, geospatial, sensor data). Develop reliable training and inference systems optimized for performance and edge deployment. Engineering Excellence: Integrate models into robust, scalable production systems with strong testing, observability, and CI/CD practices. Research & Experimentation: Prototype and benchmark new modeling approaches (LLMs, multimodal systems) to improve performance, robustness, and mission impact. WHAT YOU BRING Required - Bachelor's degree (B.Sc.) in Computer Science - Strong software engineering fundamentals - Solid understanding of machine learning principles (model evaluation, optimization, bias/variance tradeoffs) - Hands-on experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face) - Experience working with real-world datasets — cleaning, feature engineering, experimentation, and performance analysis - Strong communication and collaboration skills - Willingness to travel up to 15% to engage with DoW partners - Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance Preferred - Master's degree (M.Sc.) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field - Experience with edge-deployable or offline ML systems - Experience optimizing models for latency and compute constraints - Familiarity with distributed training or large-scale data processing - Exposure to geospatial, multimodal, or reasoning systems - Experience with containerization and orchestration tools BENEFITS - Competitive salary and equity - Opportunity to help build a category-defining defense tech company - Full health benefits - 401(k) - Offices in Washington DC and San Francisco