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Senior ML Engineer, Retrieval & Grounded Generation

100% Fully RemoteFull-time$160,000 - $190,000 per yearPosted October 1, 2026

Overview

Talon Defense seeks an ML Engineer specializing in Retrieval & Grounded Generation to develop AI capabilities that help users find and understand information. As part of a larger team of engineers and data scientists, this role will build retrieval and language model solutions, integrate them into enterprise applications, and support reliable deployment and operation.

Key Responsibilities

  • Develop embedding pipelines, vector indexes, and retrieval services for enterprise information sources
  • Build retrieval-augmented generation capabilities using language models and supporting AI frameworks
  • Design prompts and structured outputs that improve relevance, consistency, and source grounding
  • Implement evaluation and validation for retrieval quality, citations, and generated responses
  • Package, deploy, version, monitor, and maintain models and supporting services
  • Integrate AI capabilities with APIs, data platforms, and enterprise applications
  • Collaborate with engineers and data scientists to improve performance, reliability, and maintainability
  • Contribute to automated testing, technical documentation, and model lifecycle practices

Required Qualifications

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related discipline, or equivalent experience, certifications, or military technical training
  • Hands-on experience building production or near-production retrieval-augmented generation systems
  • Proficiency in Python and experience with LLM frameworks, embedding models, vector stores, and retrieval pipelines
  • Experience testing grounding and citation quality using defined evaluation methods
  • Experience with model serving, version management, deployment, monitoring, and rollback
  • Experience with APIs, Git, automated testing, and containerized deployments
  • Ability to develop traceable model workflows suitable for sensitive enterprise data
  • Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate within a multidisciplinary technical team

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience operating self-hosted or open-weight language models
  • Experience deploying ML services in restricted, disconnected, or secure enterprise environments
  • Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, and MLOps tooling
  • Experience with hybrid retrieval, reranking, knowledge graphs, or retrieval over complex narrative evidence

Compensation

$160,000 - $190,000 per year

Medical, dental, and vision coverage; 401(k) with company match; paid time off and federal holidays; life insurance; professional development and certification reimbursement.

Annual performance bonus; employee referral bonuses.

Salary offered will depend on numerous qualifying factors such as clearance, degree and the years and depth of applicable experience.

Security Clearance

An active Secret security clearance is required before starting work. Interim Secret determinations are acceptable. Top Secret clearance is preferred. Candidates must meet applicable U.S. person requirements and maintain the required clearance throughout employment.

Talon Defense, Inc. provides equal opportunities to qualified employees and prospective employees without regard to age, race, color, religion, pregnancy, sex, national origin, veteran status, uniformed status, physical or mental disability, or other protected characteristics.

Interested in this role?

Send us your resume and a brief introduction. We'd love to hear from you.

Apply Now

Questions about this position? Contact us at careers@talondefense.com