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Sr. AI Engineer, Special Programs - Top Secret Clearance

SpaceX· Starshield SI Engineering
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Palo Alto, CA$220k - $350kfull-timePosted 5mo ago

About the role

Senior AI engineer responsible for strategy, execution, and deployment of mission-critical AI solutions for U.S. federal agencies, collaborating with product, research, infrastructure, and governance teams to deliver secure, compliant AI systems and features.

Responsibilities

  • Design, build, and optimize integrations between AI frontier models (e.g., Grok family) and government systems, platforms, and data environments.
  • Identify pain points, scope product specifications, and design/build 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.
  • Enhance 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.
  • 5+ 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 engineering
Nice to have:PythonTypeScriptSecure API designGovt/DoD collaborationEvaluation frameworks for AI systemsProduction ML deployment

Benefits

  • long-term incentives in the form of company stock, stock options, or long-term cash awards
  • discretionary bonuses and 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 and 10+ paid holidays per year
  • paid sick leave per company policy
Last updated Oct 21, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About SpaceX

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