Applied AI Engineer, Public Sector
- Location
- Washington, DC
- Salary
- $280K–$320K / yr
- Posted
- October 6, 2026
- Source
- Greenhouse
Job description
About the role
As a member of the Applied AI team at Anthropic, you will be an Applied AI Engineer supporting a dedicated national security mission program. You will be the customer's trusted technical advisor, working closely with their engineering and mission teams as they build and ship new capabilities powered by Claude: advising on architecture design decisions, developing evaluation frameworks, and guiding them through the most cutting-edge implementation patterns for LLMs.
Working closely with our Sales, Product, and Engineering teams, you'll guide the customer from technical discovery through successful deployment, much of it on-site in secure environments. You'll combine deep engineering expertise and cyber domain knowledge with customer-facing skills to help the customer unlock the full potential of Claude and move their mission capabilities closer to the frontier, while maintaining our high standards for safety and reliability.
Responsibilities
- Serve as a specialist technical advisor for one or more national security mission programs, from discovery and evaluation through deployment and adoption, coordinating internally across multiple teams to drive customer success
- Support the customer as they build with Claude Code, the Claude API, and Claude for Enterprise
- Partner with account executives and Applied AI Architects to translate mission requirements into technical solutions
- Influence technical architecture decisions and integration into the customer's existing stack by developing customized pilots, prototypes, and evaluation suites
- Help develop evaluation frameworks to measure Claude's performance for mission-specific use cases
- Lead hands-on technical workshops and code reviews with customer engineering teams
- Identify common design patterns and contribute insights back to our Product and Engineering teams
- Create and deliver technical content, from engineering deep dives to executive briefings
- Maintain strong knowledge of the latest developments in LLM capabilities, implementation patterns, and AI product development stacks
- Work primarily on-site with the customer's engineering and mission teams in secure government facilities, while maintaining close internal coordination and feedback with Anthropic's Applied AI and Engineering teams
Minimum qualifications
- Active TS/SCI clearance with Polygraph
- Prior experience working within US intelligence community agencies as a government civilian or cleared contractor
- 4+ years of experience in technical roles such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Product Engineer, Software Engineer, or Technical Product Manager, with a desire to work closely with customers
- Strong programming skills with proficiency in Python or TypeScript and experience building production applications
- Hands-on expertise in one or more of the following domains:
- Offensive or defensive cyber operations (including vulnerability research, reverse engineering, and ICS/OT security)
- Cryptography and cryptanalysis
- Intelligence analysis and ISR (all-source, SIGINT, GEOINT)
- Mission and weapons systems (command and control, space, electronic warfare, autonomy)
- CBRN and nonproliferation
- Accreditation of classified systems (RMF, ATO, cross-domain solutions)
- Exceptional communication skills to convey technical concepts to diverse stakeholders, from engineers to executives, while maintaining a low ego and collaborative approach
Preferred qualifications
- Production experience with LLMs, including advanced prompt engineering, agent development and frameworks, evaluation frameworks, transcript analysis, MCP, and deployment at scale
- Experience deploying and operating software in air-gapped or classified environments
- Experience designing scalable cloud architectures and integrating with enterprise systems
- Background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, or data science
- Ability to navigate ambiguity and execute across domains with intellectual openness, finding simple solutions to complex problems
- High cooperation mindset for cross-organizational collaboration, balancing competing priorities with integrity
- Passion for advancing safe, beneficial AI systems through creative technical applications
Deadline to apply: None. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
Annual Salary
$280,000 — $320,000 USD