Job Type
Full-time
Description
Detroit Defense seeks a motivated, career and customer-oriented AI Engineer to join our team in Troy, MI (on-site) or remote.
The AI Engineer plays a pivotal role in advancing Detroit Defense's mission across the Department of Defense (DoD) by designing, building, and integrating intelligent systems into our software products. This position embeds conversational AI capabilities into applications-designing the interaction, connecting language models to backend tools and data, and ensuring those integrations are reliable and effective in real use-while also applying machine learning to problems spanning classification, prediction, and simulation. As a generalist comfortable moving across the AI and software stack, the AI Engineer partners closely with our software engineering team to ship production-quality features and supports their deployment, testing, and ongoing iteration.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:- Integrate conversational AI assistant features into software applications, owning the experience end to end
- Design, implement, and evaluate tool/function calling so AI assistants can reliably invoke backend capabilities and return correct, useful results
- Write, test, and refine prompts; evaluate and improve the accuracy and effectiveness of LLM and tool-calling behavior
- Build, train, and evaluate machine learning models for classification, prediction, and simulation tasks
- Collaborate with software engineers to integrate AI capabilities into applications and services
- Use Git for version control and contribute to shared team repositories
- Document your work and communicate results clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Support deployment, testing, and iteration of AI capabilities alongside the broader engineering team
Requirements
Required - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- Experience integrating large language models via APIs, including function/tool calling and structured (e.g., JSON) outputs
- Foundation in machine learning and data science concepts (supervised learning, model evaluation, statistics)
- Working knowledge of Git and collaborative software development workflows (version control, branching, code review)
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work effectively on a cross-functional engineering team
- U.S. person (per ITAR/EAR) able to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government Secret clearance
Preferred - Strong proficiency in Python and/or C# (depth in either is welcome; both is a plus)
- Experience building chat/assistant interfaces or agentic systems, ideally in production
- Familiarity with tool-calling/agent frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and vector databases
- Experience defining evaluations or test harnesses to measure and improve LLM and tool-calling reliability
- Internship, academic, or project experience building and deploying models or AI features end-to-end
- Exposure to software engineering fundamentals: APIs, testing, CI/CD, containerization
- Use of GitLab for issue tracking and software configuration management
- Familiarity with secure AI/compute environments
Detroit Defense offers an impressive compensation and benefits package including:- Medical, Dental & Vision Benefits
- Company Paid Life and AD&D
- Company Paid Short Term and Long-Term Disability
- Flexible Spending & HSA Accounts
- Legal & ID Shield Services
- 401k with Company Match
- Paid Holidays
- Paid Time Off (PTO)
Salary Description
$82,500
