# ML Engineer, Retrieval & Grounded Generation at DEFCON AI

- Company: DEFCON AI
- What the company does: DEFCON AI engineers AI solutions that are powered by advanced optimization across a range of industries, translating complex operations into scalable success. Backed by Bessemer.
- Company website: https://www.defconai.com/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Mid level
- Location: Remote, USA
- Work setup: Remote
- Pay: $165K to $200K base salary per year (USD)
- Posted: 2026-10-01
- Apply by: 2026-11-23
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/defcon/jobs/5253391007?utm_source=1752vc&utm_medium=careers
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/defcon-ai-ml-engineer-retrieval-and-grounded-generation/

## About the role

You'll join the analytics and AI engineering team behind a system that genuinely matters: an AI-assisted platform that pulls together records from dozens of external feeds, resolves them to the right person, surfaces what a human reviewer should look at first, and explains every recommendation in plain, defensible terms — running inside a secure government cloud environment. It's the kind of problem where the details you get right are the ones that count, which is exactly what makes it worth doing well. Found on 1752vc Careers, the job board for startup and VC roles.

## What they're looking for

- Implement embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval across a large, provenance-tracked evidence base
- Integrate language models so generated text is bound to cited source records, test for citation failures rather than assuming them away
- Design prompts and output schemas
- Own model packaging, versioning, serving, and rollback
- Instrument telemetry for retrieval and generation quality, recommendation/version attribution, overrides, abstentions, grounding failures, latency, throughput, and measurement events defined with Model Test
- Provide bounded model assistance for difficult narrative extraction where deterministic processing is insufficient, with every output tied to its source passage

Tags: Defcon - Engineering

Source: 1752vc Careers, https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/defcon-ai-ml-engineer-retrieval-and-grounded-generation/