AI Engineer in Bathesda, Virginia at Apavo Corporation

About Apavo

Apavo is a woman-owned cybersecurity company supporting Department of Defense and Intelligence Community missions. We're a small, dedicated team where your expertise is valued and your work directly supports national security.

About the Role

Apavo is hiring AI Engineers to build and integrate secure AI capabilities for an Intelligence Community mission. You'll work on site with government users and a cross-functional engineering team to take AI tools from prototype to operational use.

What You'll Do

• Build and integrate secure AI gateway services: model-provider APIs, model routing, request validation, rate limiting, and usage and cost controls.
• Develop agentic applications and workflows using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and schema-validated tool calls.
• Enforce identity, authorization, and policy controls, and maintain audit trails and request tracing.
• Evaluate model and agent behavior, including prompt-injection and data-leakage testing, guardrails, and redaction.
• Demonstrate capabilities to mission users and fold their feedback into the next release.

Required Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance.
• 8+ years of software engineering, including hands-on work deploying AI or ML capabilities.
• Strong Python and experience with REST APIs and LLM provider interfaces.
• Experience building RAG pipelines or agent workflows in production.

Preferred Qualifications

• Current on-site work in an IC customer space, with active account access.
• Experience in IL4 or classified environments.
• Containers, Kubernetes or OpenShift, and secure software development practices.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance starting on your first day, with Apavo covering 90% effective January 1, 2027.
• 401(k) with a 3.5% employer match, starting January 1, 2027.
• 20 days of paid time off plus 11 paid federal holidays.
• Up to $3,000 a year in training and certification reimbursement.
• Parking reimbursement.

Apavo is an Equal Opportunity Employer.