Lead Machine Learning Engineer

Lead AI/ML Engineer, Agentic AI

Compensation: $200,000 - $250,000 + equity (relocation assistance provided)

Location: 100% onsite in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Travel: Occasional travel to Washington, D.C.

MUST BE A US CITIZEN

Join a rapidly scaling national security technology company building AI-powered software for mission-critical government workflows.

The company’s core platform combines curated defense acquisition data with a large-scale knowledge graph, helping customers improve operational readiness across complex supply chain, systems, and equipment workflows.

As Lead AI/ML Engineer, you will provide hands-on technical leadership for a growing AI agent team. You will help evolve the company’s AI product from retrieval and Q&A into a proactive, tool-using system that can automate real customer workflows.

This is an individual contributor role with significant ownership. You will lead day-to-day technical execution, guide engineering decisions, and ship production systems—not just prototypes.

What You’ll Do

• Lead technical execution for a team building agentic AI capabilities
• Develop proactive, reactive, and tool-using agent workflows
• Translate complex customer needs into production AI systems
• Own zero-to-one initiatives from design through deployment
• Support agile ceremonies and help coordinate day-to-day delivery
• Work closely with engineers onsite to iterate quickly and solve problems
• Evaluate and apply modern LLM, agent, and coding-assistant tooling

What You’ll Bring

• Strong hands-on software or machine learning engineering experience
• Experience leading technical projects without formal people management
• A track record of shipping production AI or LLM-powered systems
• Recent experience with agent frameworks, coding agents, or tool-using AI
• Strong ownership, curiosity, and comfort operating with ambiguity
• A practical, delivery-focused approach to zero-to-one development
• US citizenship
• Ability to work onsite full-time in Pittsburgh

Tech Stack

• Python
• Anthropic Claude and OpenAI models
• Agent SDKs and custom orchestration frameworks
• Tool calling and structured outputs
• Retrieval-augmented generation
• Coding agents and code-generation tools
• Backend services, APIs, and production AI infrastructure

Nice to Have

• Experience in defense, government, supply chain, logistics, or national security
• Experience building workflow automation or enterprise AI products
• Background in a startup or other high-ownership environment

Why Join?

You will take technical ownership of a high-priority AI product used in real national security workflows. The role offers meaningful customer impact, close collaboration with a highly engaged engineering team, and the opportunity to shape how agentic AI moves from retrieval into production workflow automation.

About People In AI

People In AI connects exceptional AI, machine learning, data, and engineering professionals with ambitious technology companies. We provide transparent guidance, detailed role context, and support throughout the hiring process.