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AI Engineer, Special Programs - Top Secret Clearance

SpaceX· Starshield AI Engineering
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Washington, DC$125k - $220kfull-timePosted 5mo ago

About the role

AI engineers work with end customers to own strategy, execution, and deployment of mission-critical AI solutions for U.S. federal agencies, collaborating with product, research, infrastructure, and governance teams to deliver high-stakes projects with safety, transparency, and ethical standards.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and optimize integrations between AI frontier models (e.g., Grok family) and government systems, platforms, and data environments.
  • Identify pain points, scoping product specifications, and designing and building AI-powered software for government or enterprise use cases.
  • Benchmark models and develop evaluation frameworks to assess performance and address weaknesses, ensuring compliance with customer standards.
  • Enhancing model performance through system prompt tuning or fine-tuning, with an eye toward secure and scalable deployment.
  • Analyze request logs, prompt data, or system outputs to ensure reliability and audibility.
  • Build internal tooling to streamline workflows and automate repetitive tasks in secure environments.
  • Partner with agency stakeholders to understand requirements, prototype solutions, and iterate rapidly based on real-world feedback.
  • Ship production-grade code and features with a bias toward speed, simplicity, and measurable impact.

Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in computer science, mathematics, computer engineering, physics, or data science.
  • 1+ years of hands-on software engineering experience building scalable systems, APIs, or AI/ML applications.
  • Active Top-Secret or Top-Secret SCI.

Skills

Required:AI/ML software engineeringAPI design and developmentSecure software engineeringModel evaluation and fine-tuning
Nice to have:PythonTypeScriptHardware/secure environmentsDocumentation/SDKs

Benefits

  • long-term incentives, in the form of company stock, stock options, or long-term cash awards
  • discretionary bonuses
  • Employee Stock Purchase Plan
  • comprehensive medical, vision, and dental coverage
  • 401(k) retirement plan
  • short and long-term disability insurance
  • life insurance
  • paid parental leave
  • 3 weeks of paid vacation
  • 10+ paid holidays per year
  • paid sick leave per company policy
Last updated Jul 8, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About SpaceX

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