AI Engineer in Troy, Michigan at Detroit Defense

Elevate your career with Detroit Defense! Join a dynamic team dedicated to national security through cutting-edge technology. Detroit Defense is a leader in delivering advanced solutions to the Department of War (DoW). Dive into innovation in Systems Engineering, Combat Vehicle Integration, Digital Transformation, Cybersecurity, IT, Data Analytics and Software Development. Your journey to impactful work and rapid growth starts now—Behind the Mission Beyond the Challenge!

Detroit Defense seeks a motivated, career and customer-oriented AI Engineer to join our team in Troy, MI (on-site) or remote.

The AI Engineer plays a pivotal role in advancing Detroit Defense's mission across the Department of Defense (DoD) by designing, building, and integrating intelligent systems into our software products. This position embeds conversational AI capabilities into applications—designing the interaction, connecting language models to backend tools and data, and ensuring those integrations are reliable and effective in real use—while also applying machine learning to problems spanning classification, prediction, and simulation. As a generalist comfortable moving across the AI and software stack, the AI Engineer partners closely with our software engineering team to ship production-quality features and supports their deployment, testing, and ongoing iteration.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Integrate conversational AI assistant features into software applications, owning the experience end to end
• Design, implement, and evaluate tool/function calling so AI assistants can reliably invoke backend capabilities and return correct, useful results
• Write, test, and refine prompts; evaluate and improve the accuracy and effectiveness of LLM and tool-calling behavior
• Build, train, and evaluate machine learning models for classification, prediction, and simulation tasks
• Collaborate with software engineers to integrate AI capabilities into applications and services
• Use Git for version control and contribute to shared team repositories
• Document your work and communicate results clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Support deployment, testing, and iteration of AI capabilities alongside the broader engineering team

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience integrating large language models via APIs, including function/tool calling and structured (e.g., JSON) outputs
• Foundation in machine learning and data science concepts (supervised learning, model evaluation, statistics)
• Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows (version control, branching, code review)
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work effectively on a cross-functional engineering team
• U.S. person (per ITAR/EAR) able to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government Secret clearance

Preferred

• Strong proficiency in Python and/or C# (depth in either is welcome; both is a plus)
• Experience building chat/assistant interfaces or agentic systems, ideally in production
• Familiarity with tool-calling/agent frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and vector databases
• Experience defining evaluations or test harnesses to measure and improve LLM and tool-calling reliability
• Internship, academic, or project experience building and deploying models or AI features end-to-end
• Exposure to software engineering fundamentals: APIs, testing, CI/CD, containerization
• Use of GitLab for issue tracking and software configuration management
• Familiarity with secure AI/compute environments

Detroit Defense offers an impressive compensation and benefits package including:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Benefits
• Company Paid Life and AD&D
• Company Paid Short Term and Long-Term Disability
• Flexible Spending & HSA Accounts
• Legal & ID Shield Services
• 401k with Company Match
• Paid Holidays
• Paid Time Off (PTO)

Why Detroit Defense:
At Detroit Defense, we deliver mission-critical solutions that enhance national security, protect the warfighter, and enable readiness through innovation, technical excellence, and end-to-end lifecycle support.

Remaining steadfast in our core values of Trustworthy, Mission Driven, Creative, and Agile we are a complex systems integrator for the U.S. Government, Detroit Defense provides solutions to meet the technical and programmatic challenges faced by our customers. Our proven success in multi-domain cross-platform system-of-systems integration results in fielded capability for warfighters. From R&D to production, fielding, and sustainment, Detroit Defense provides services and solutions to Empower Those That protect Us.

Veterans Encouraged to Apply: Detroit Defense proudly supports those who have served. We welcome applicants with military experience, including those transitioning to civilian careers. Your leadership, adaptability, and mission-focused mindset are valued here.

Detroit Defense is a proud recipient of the Hire Vets Gold Medallion Award since 2022.

Detroit Defense is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex (including gender identity or gender expression), age, mental or physical disability, creed, ancestry, citizenship, veteran status, marital status, sexual orientation, medical condition, genetic trait or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local law.