Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Code Metal is redefining code translation for mission-critical industries, helping defense partners move more quickly and reliably from algorithm to silicon. As an Applied AI Research Engineer, you will design and build agentic AI systems that assist military planners in exploring and evaluating operational courses of action, integrating advanced AI models with human-in-the-loop decision-making.

Responsibilities

• Design and build agentic AI systems for planning, decision support, and human-machine teaming
• Develop AI pipelines that integrate foundation models, retrieval, simulation, external tools, and deterministic software
• Design, run, and analyze experiments to evaluate model and agent performance, reliability, traceability, latency, cost, and user trust
• Fine-tune, distill, and evaluate foundation models for domain-specific planning, reasoning, and decision-support tasks
• Build datasets, retrieval pipelines, automated benchmarks, and experiment infrastructure to support continuous model improvement and reproducible research
• Partner with software engineers to transition research prototypes into scalable AI services
• Collaborate with domain experts to translate operational workflows into AI-enabled capabilities while ensuring AI outputs remain explainable, reviewable, and under human control

Skills

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years building AI, machine learning, or applied research systems
• Strong Python engineering skills
• Experience with PyTorch and modern LLM tooling (Transformers, vLLM, Hugging Face, etc.)
• Experience building or deploying agentic AI systems, tool-calling workflows, or multi-step reasoning pipelines
• Experience fine-tuning, evaluating, or serving language models
• Experience with retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector search, or knowledge retrieval systems
• Strong understanding of experiment design, benchmarking, and model evaluation
• Ability to move quickly from research prototype to production-quality implementation
• Eligible to obtain a U.S. security clearance

Benefits

• Health care plan with 100% premium coverage, including medical, dental, and vision
• 401k with 5% matching
• Paid Time Off (uncapped vacation, plus sick and public holidays)
• Flexible hybrid or remote work arrangement
• Relocation assistance for qualifying employees

Company Overview