Applied AI Engineer, Cyber, Government
$211k - $302k • Washington, DC • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Job Location
Washington, DC
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
We are seeking a hands-on Applied AI Engineer with deep cybersecurity experience and a product mindset to help government and national security customers apply frontier AI to critical cyber missions. You will bring practical expertise in areas such as red teaming, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, and threat hunting, ideally developed through work with the defense and intelligence sector. Working directly with cyber operators, security researchers, and engineering teams, you’ll identify high-value applications, write code, build and evaluate AI-powered tools and agentic workflows, and move solutions from prototype into secure operational use. You’ll design architectures using OpenAI models, APIs, and existing security tooling, grounded in customers’ mission requirements and operational constraints. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Applied Research, Product, and Security teams to deliver measurable improvements in cyber capabilities and translate customer experience into better models and products.
Responsibilities
- Work on-site with clients in the DMV area.
- Lead hands-on implementation for government cyber use cases, collaborating with technical owners, customer engineers, cyber operators, and security practitioners.
- Identify high-value AI applications across red teaming, adversary emulation, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, detection engineering, incident response, and malware analysis.
- Build secure cyber prototypes, agentic workflows, and reference architectures using OpenAI models, supported APIs, Codex, and integrations with customer security tools.
- Design and execute evaluations to measure technical correctness, security impact, reliability, and operator effectiveness, using results to guide implementation.
- Partner with government security leaders, mission teams, account owners, integrators, and OpenAI Security and Product teams to establish success criteria and deliver outcomes.
- Contribute reusable code, examples, and technical guidance to open-source developer and enterprise resources.
- Share knowledge, codify best practices, and publish notebooks and implementation patterns to internal and external repositories.
- Translate customer deployments, operational insights, and evaluation results into actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, and Research teams.
Requirements
- Hold an active TS/SCI clearance and a current, active full-scope polygraph.
- 7+ years of hands-on technical experience in cybersecurity, cyber operations, or security-focused software engineering, including work with government customers or national security mission teams.
- Practical experience across offensive and defensive cybersecurity, with depth in areas such as red teaming, adversary emulation, vulnerability research, reverse engineering, threat hunting, or detection engineering.
- Experience supporting NSA or comparable national security cyber missions is strongly preferred.
- Personally written code, integrated security tools, and built, tested, and deployed cyber capabilities or security automation with measurable outcomes.
- Understand secure network and cloud architecture, identity and least privilege, restricted operating environments, application-security toolchains, authorization boundaries, and human-approved remediation.
- Hands-on programming experience with languages such as Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or Go.
- Ability to integrate APIs, agents, command-line tools, and security platforms into reliable workflows.
- Clear communication skills with cyber practitioners, engineers, senior leaders, and nontechnical stakeholders.
- Ability to own problems end to end and learn unfamiliar tools, systems, or mission requirements.
- Collaborative approach, sharing knowledge generously.
- Ability to drive multiple concurrent projects with urgency, sound judgment, and clear prioritization.