AI Engineer

Company Overview

Prepare first. Decide first. Win first.

At Pytho, we're on a mission to ensure warfighters are prepared for every challenge they face. We are committed to assembling a world-class team of exceptional problem solvers, combining expert engineering talent with deep experience in National Security.

We build AI for the most important problem in defense — making sure the force is ready to fight. Our software is deployed and in use with DoW partners today.

The Opportunity

We're building out our AI Engineering Team. This is a chance to join at the earliest stage of a company where the engineering problems are genuinely hard — planning under uncertainty, multi-agent coordination, simulation, reinforcement learning — and the work is deployed in environments where the output actually matters.

You will work across the full ML lifecycle — transforming messy, real-world data into production-grade models deployed in high-stakes environments. You'll ship fast, work directly with the founders, and have outsized influence on the technical direction of the company.

Key Responsibilities

AI/ML Development : Design, train, fine-tune, and deploy ML models to solve real-world operational problems. Own the lifecycle from data exploration and feature engineering to evaluation and production monitoring.

Data & Systems Engineering : Build scalable data pipelines for structured and unstructured data (text, imagery, geospatial, sensor data). Develop reliable training and inference systems optimized for performance and edge deployment.

Engineering Excellence : Integrate models into robust, scalable production systems with strong testing, observability, and CI/CD practices.

Research & Experimentation : Prototype and benchmark new modeling approaches (LLMs, multimodal systems) to improve performance, robustness, and mission impact.

What You Bring

Required

Bachelor's degree (B.Sc.) in Computer Science

Strong software engineering fundamentals

Solid understanding of machine learning principles (model evaluation, optimization, bias/variance tradeoffs)

Hands-on experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face)

Experience working with real-world datasets — cleaning, feature engineering, experimentation, and performance analysis

Strong communication and collaboration skills

Willingness to travel up to 15% to engage with DoW partners

Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance

Preferred

Master's degree (M.Sc.) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field

Experience with edge-deployable or offline ML systems

Experience optimizing models for latency and compute constraints

Familiarity with distributed training or large-scale data processing

Exposure to geospatial, multimodal, or reasoning systems

Experience with containerization and orchestration tools

Benefits

Competitive salary and equity

Opportunity to help build a category-defining defense tech company

Full health benefits

401(k)

Offices in Washington DC and San Francisco