Job Details

Who is Recruiting from Scratch:

Recruiting from Scratch is a premier talent firm that focuses on placing the best product managers, software, and hardware talent at innovative companies. Our team is 100% remote and we work with teams across the United States to help them hire.

About the client :

Title of Role: Applied ML Engineer
Location: San Francisco, CA
Company Stage of Funding: Early-Stage Venture
Office Type: Onsite (5 Days a Week)
Salary: Highly Competitive (Industry-Leading Salary + Equity)
Company Description

We are working with a cutting-edge, venture-backed startup at the intersection of artificial intelligence and government technology. This stealth-mode company is redefining how government contracting is done by integrating general-purpose intelligence into high-stakes, mission-critical workflows.

With backing from major defense and government contractors and a leadership team composed of veterans from organizations like Anduril, Amazon, Robinhood, Google, and the Department of Defense, the company is already securing significant global contracts and operating in a space with immense national and international relevance.

This is an exceptional opportunity to get in at the ground floor of a transformative venture in a $1T+ market with virtually no technical incumbents.
What You Will Do

• Build and optimize AI-powered product features that directly impact real-world government workflows.
• Improve the precision, reliability, and explainability of outputs generated by large language models.
• Develop advanced semantic retrieval systems using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Knowledge Graphs, and other techniques.
• Engineer scalable systems to collect, index, and manage massive government datasets with a focus on security and compliance.
• Tackle unsolved problems at the frontier of AI by adapting, evaluating, and deploying LLMs in complex, high-assurance production environments.

Ideal Candidate Background

• 3+ years of experience in applied machine learning, ML engineering, or AI research roles.
• Proven experience building end-to-end ML systems and infrastructure in production environments.
• Strong background working with large language models, including fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization for domain-specific tasks.
• Prior work in complex AI applications such as search, information retrieval, knowledge graphs, or evaluation frameworks for generative models.
• High attention to detail and user experience; thrives on building robust, high-impact products.

Preferred

• Background in elite research environments or institutions with a strong track record of AI innovation.
• Experience dealing with sensitive, regulated, or secure datasets-especially in government, defense, or enterprise contexts.
• Passion for startup environments, especially early-stage ventures solving hard technical problems.
• Exposure to autonomous systems, defense tech, or dual-use AI applications is a plus.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary: Industry-leading base salary, reflective of your experience and expertise.
• Equity: Generous equity package with early-stage upside.
• Work Schedule: In-person collaboration in a secure, high-performance engineering environment (5 days/week).
• Mission: Contribute to building intelligent, secure systems that modernize one of the most critical and under-innovated domains in the world-government operations and defense.

This role offers the opportunity to not only push the boundaries of generative AI, but also to contribute meaningfully to national innovation and security. If you're an ambitious ML engineer ready to shape the future of autonomous government technology, we'd love to hear from you.