Applied AI Research Engineer

Summary

Code Metal is redefining code translation for mission-critical industries, and they are seeking an Applied AI Research Engineer to help build next-generation AI systems for military planners. This role focuses on designing and building agentic AI systems that support operational decision-making, allowing users to explore choices with speed and confidence.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agentic AI systems for planning, decision support, and human-machine teaming
• Develop AI pipelines that integrate foundation models, retrieval, simulation, external tools, and deterministic software
• Design, run, and analyze experiments to evaluate model and agent performance, reliability, traceability, latency, cost, and user trust
• Fine-tune, distill, and evaluate foundation models for domain-specific planning, reasoning, and decision-support tasks
• Build datasets, retrieval pipelines, automated benchmarks, and experiment infrastructure to support continuous model improvement and reproducible research
• Partner with software engineers to transition research prototypes into scalable AI services
• Collaborate with domain experts to translate operational workflows into AI-enabled capabilities while ensuring AI outputs remain explainable, reviewable, and under human control

Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years building AI, machine learning, or applied research systems
• Strong Python engineering skills
• Experience with PyTorch and modern LLM tooling (Transformers, vLLM, Hugging Face, etc.)
• Experience building or deploying agentic AI systems, tool-calling workflows, or multi-step reasoning pipelines
• Experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or serving language models
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, or knowledge retrieval systems
• Strong understanding of experiment design, benchmarking, and model evaluation
• Ability to move quickly from research prototype to production-quality implementation
• Eligible to obtain a U.S. security clearance

Qualifications

Must Haves

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years building AI, machine learning, or applied research systems
• Strong Python engineering skills
• Experience with PyTorch and modern LLM tooling (Transformers, vLLM, Hugging Face, etc.)
• Experience building or deploying agentic AI systems, tool-calling workflows, or multi-step reasoning pipelines
• Experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or serving language models
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, or knowledge retrieval systems
• Strong understanding of experiment design, benchmarking, and model evaluation
• Ability to move quickly from research prototype to production-quality implementation
• Eligible to obtain a U.S. security clearance

Benefits

• Health care plan with 100% premium coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
• 401k with 5% matching
• Paid Time Off (uncapped vacation, plus sick and public holidays)
• Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement
• Relocation assistance for qualifying employees