---
title: 'Data & ML Engineer at Red Cell Partners'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-ml-engineer-red-cell-partners-united-states-6r421mbxjc76'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Data & ML Engineer at Red Cell Partners

- **Company:** Red Cell Partners
- **Location:** United States
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-08-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/redcellpartners/jobs/5205467007

## Job description

## About Us

Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm building and investing in rapidly scalable technology-led companies that are bringing revolutionary advancements to market in three distinct practice areas: healthcare, cyber, and national security. United by a shared sense of duty and deep belief in the power of innovation, Red Cell is developing powerful tools and solutions to address our Nation’s most pressing problems.

## ABOUT DEFCON AI

RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF DISRUPTION. DEFCON AI is an insights company that leverages artificial intelligence, mathematical optimization, data analytics, and software engineering for resilient optimization of complex systems. In today’s dynamically changing world, DEFCON AI’s technology aligns outcomes with operational goals, better decision making, and empowers customers to anticipate assess, and mitigate the impacts of disruptions.

## About the Role

As a Data & ML Engineer you will build the data and model layer behind an AI-enabled decision-support system operating inside an accredited environment. That work covers ingestion from many source systems, resolution of incoming records against a shared data model, relevance scoring, and generation of explanations a user can act on and defend.

Three characteristics make this a substantial technical challenge. The incoming data is predominantly low-signal, which means a model can report strong overall accuracy while failing on the cases that matter most. Every output must remain traceable to the underlying sources, because a person downstream is accountable for the result. Record matching is probabilistic rather than exact, so false matches and missed matches both carry meaningful cost.

You will not be starting from an empty repository. We operate an established platform for source custody, extraction, and retrieval, and its architect is a member of this team, so existing design decisions are documented and accessible. Your work will focus on new capability rather than maintenance: record matching, calibrated scoring, and grounded generation, hardened for the target environment. We build with current tooling and expect the same, including the use of AI assistance in our own engineering practice.

This is a fully remote role with occasional travel (up to 25%) to DEFCON AI HQ, customer sites, and vendor facilities as required.

## Key Responsibilities

The technical work falls into four areas. Deep expertise in all four is not expected, so please indicate where your depth lies when you apply. The engineering standards that follow apply to everyone on the team.

Data Modeling and Record Matching

- Design and maintain the graph of entities, records, and the typed relationships between them
- Implement probabilistic matching, including blocking, candidate generation, pairwise scoring, clustering, and threshold policy
- Build deduplication and known-record suppression
- Establish provenance so that every node and edge traces to the source that asserted it
- Produce interface and data-flow design documentation detailed enough to serve as an implementation reference for other engineers

Scoring and Calibration

- Develop relevance and priority models over large, imperfect record sets
- Own calibration and threshold design, establishing what a score means rather than only how it ranks
- Design abstention policy that routes uncertain and high-risk cases to a person rather than returning a confident answer
- Perform feature engineering, establish baselines before introducing complex models, and conduct error analysis that accounts for the differing cost of false positives and false negatives

Retrieval and Generation

- Implement embeddings, vector storage, and retrieval across a large provenance-tracked evidence base
- Integrate language models through an approved managed service, and maintain a self-hosted or open-weight alternative within the same boundary
- Design prompts and output schemas
- Bind generated text to cited source records, and treat "insufficient evidence" as a valid system response rather than forcing a conclusion
- Own model packaging, serving, versioning, and rollback

Pipelines and Source Handling

- Build secure ingestion, transformation, validation, and publishing across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources
- Implement quality checks, schema validation, lineage capture, and audit logging
- Establish source drift detection so that degradation is surfaced rather than carried into the analysis
- Generate statistically representative synthetic data so that development can proceed ahead of live data access

Engineering Standards

- Work to the data model and standards set by the Data Lead, who approves designs and owns them through customer review
- Document assumptions, caveats, transformation logic, and known limitations, since deliverables are formally reviewed
- Instrument telemetry so that measurement does not require manual reconstruction
- Maintain the audit trail covering recommendations, human overrides, and model versions
- Submit model and pipeline changes through a gated release process rather than deploying in place

Required Qualifications

- 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, applied machine learning, ML engineering, or production analytics engineering
- Strong Python and SQL, with demonstrated experience working with large, imperfect operational data
- Experience delivering systems for sustained operational use rather than exploratory analysis alone
- Routine use of AI-assisted development, with informed judgment about where it adds value and where its output requires verification
- Ability to explain a technical decision to a stakeholder who must defend that decision without understanding its internals
- US Citizenship Required
- Active US Secret clearance. The work is performed in a controlled government cloud environment and requires a favorable investigation and CAC eligibility from the start
- Elevated personnel security requirements apply to portions of this work and are discussed during screening
- Willingness to travel up to 25% to customer sites, DEFCON AI HQ, and vendor facilities as required

## Preferred Qualifications

- Clearance: active Top Secret
- Matching: direct experience applying probabilistic matching to inconsistent identity data, including names, dates, addresses, and identifiers, and familiarity with the failure modes of each. Record linkage, master data management, or identity management. Graph data modeling. PostgreSQL and pgvector or comparable. Graph algorithms applied in production
- Modeling: model calibration and threshold design. Cost-sensitive learning where error types carry unequal consequences. scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch
- Retrieval and generation: retrieval-augmented generation in production. Prompt and output-schema design. Establishing that generated output remains grounded in its sources, and testing to confirm it. Self-hosted or open-weight model operation. Fine-tuning, adapters, or custom embeddings
- Pipelines: AWS Glue, Airflow, dbt, Spark, Kafka, or NiFi. Unstructured and semi-structured document ingestion. Synthetic or representative test data generation
- Environment: federal DevSecOps, RMF, ATO, or DoW cloud environments. Hardened base images. Experience advancing a pipeline from development through accreditation and deployment
- Domain: sensitive federal or defense data, and work performed under privacy or comparable handling constraints
- Responsible AI: documentation, model cards, fairness testing, and model monitoring. NIST AI RMF or comparable practice

What Success Looks Like

- A data model that the rest of the team builds on without needing to redesign it
- Matching decisions that can be explained and defended to a non-technical reviewer
- Models whose miss rate is characterized, not only their overall accuracy
- Generated explanations that assert no more than the sources support, with the citation path intact
- Pipelines that surface problems early and trace them to a specific source
- Consistent development progress, including during periods when live data is not yet available

What We Offer:

- A fully remote, results-based environment
- Competitive salary, bonus, and equity package
- 100% employer paid, comprehensive health insurance including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family
- Unlimited PTO, with your manager’s approval
- Flexible work environment where you manage your work day
- 14 weeks of fully-paid parental leave

Salary Range: $150,000-$200,000. This represents the typical salary range for this position based on experience, skills, and other factors.

Our Red Cell Partners Benefits (may differ for each incubation):

For full-time roles

- Career track opportunity with potential for rapid advancement with strong performance as the firm grows
- 100% employer paid, comprehensive health care including medical, dental, and vision for you and your family.
- Paid maternity and paternity for 14 weeks at employees' normal pay.
- Unlimited PTO, with management approval.
- Opportunities for professional development and continued learning.
- Optional 401K, FSA, and equity incentives available.
- Mental health benefits are available through [Tara Mind](https://www.taramind.com/).
- Cost effective GLP-1 solutions available through [Crux](https://soon.getcrux.com/).

We’re an Equal Opportunity Employer: You’ll receive consideration for employment without regard to race, sex, color, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, or on the basis of disability.

Applicant Data Disclosure

By submitting an application, you acknowledge that Red Cell Partners, LLC ("Red Cell") uses third-party service providers to facilitate its recruitment and hiring processes. These providers include applicant tracking systems, candidate verification platforms, and fraud detection tools (collectively, "Hiring Platforms"). Your application materials, including your résumé, cover letter, work samples, responses to application questions, and any other information you submit, may be transmitted to and processed by these Hiring Platforms for the following purposes:

- Managing and administering your application throughout the hiring process;
- Verifying the accuracy and authenticity of application materials, including by cross-referencing information you provide against publicly available sources and proprietary databases;
- Identifying indicators of potentially fraudulent, fabricated, or materially misleading application content, including but not limited to discrepancies between submitted materials and publicly available professional profiles, geographic anomalies, and fabricated work histories.

Applications that are flagged through this process as containing indicators of fraud or material misrepresentation may be declined from further consideration. If you have questions about the status of your application or the evaluation process, please contact talent@redcellpartners.com.

Red Cell requires its Hiring Platform providers to process your information solely for the purposes described above and in accordance with applicable law. Your information will be retained only for as long as necessary to fulfill these purposes and any applicable legal obligations, after which it will be deleted in accordance with Red Cell's data retention policies.

For more information about how your data is used, please refer to our Privacy Policy and [Applicant Privacy Notice](https://www.redcellpartners.com/applicant-privacy-policy/).

## About Red Cell Partners

## Company Overview

- **One-liner**: Red Cell Partners is an incubation firm that builds, launches, and scales technology-led companies in healthcare, cyber, and national security.
- **Entity Type**: Private (incubation firm) – has raised $497M across the firm and its incubations
- **Headquarters**: McLean, Virginia, United States
- **Founded**: 2020
- **Founders**: Grant Verstandig

## Core Business

- Primary industries: Venture building / incubation; practice areas are Healthcare, Cyber, and National Security.
- Target customers: The firm sells to no single customer; it builds B2B companies that serve government agencies, defense organizations, healthcare providers, and enterprise security teams.
- Mission: “To build a healthier, safer, and more secure future for the next generation.” [about page]

## Products & Services

Red Cell does not sell a single product; it operates three practice areas that each incubate separate technology companies:

- **Healthcare Practice**: Incubates companies focused on improving patient outcomes, care delivery, and healthcare operations (e.g., senior living technology, care coordination).
- **Cyber Practice**: Incubates companies in cybersecurity, including AI-driven security operations centers and threat protection.
- **National Security Practice**: Incubates companies in defense, resilience, and national security (e.g., power delivery, disruption response).

## Market Standing

- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed (private firm).
- **Key Metric**: $497M raised across Red Cell Partners and its portfolio of incubations. [home page]
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly named, but key executives include Grant Verstandig (Founder, Chairman & CEO), David Silverman (President), George Barnes (President, Cyber Practice), Honorable Veronica Daigle (President, National Security Practice), and Timothy Ferris (President, Healthcare Practice). The firm has acquired companies such as Andesite AI and TRADE SYSTEMS INC. [LinkedIn]
- **Growth Signals**: 
  - 75 full-time Red Cell employees (as of June 2026) [home page]. LinkedIn reports 69 employees with +3.4% monthly growth.
  - 9 companies publicly launched; average incubation period of 16 months. [home page]
  - 36 active job postings, up 125% year over year. [LinkedIn]

## Competitive Advantages

- **CIA-Inspired Methodology**: The firm’s name and approach derive from the CIA’s post-9/11 “Red Cell” concept – assembling cross-functional experts to challenge conventional models and propose novel solutions.
- **Vertically Focused Incubation**: Unlike generalist venture builders, Red Cell concentrates exclusively on three mission-critical sectors (healthcare, cyber, national security) where government and enterprise demand is high and regulatory barriers create moats.
- **High Talent Density**: Leaders include former senior government officials and military operators (e.g., George Barnes, former NSA deputy director; Veronica Daigle, former federal judge; Marcus Capone, former Navy SEAL).

## Strategic Focus

- Continue scaling its three practice areas and launching new companies from each.
- Extend incubation capabilities into adjacent defense and healthcare sub-verticals.
- Grow headcount aggressively (job postings up 125% YoY) to support a pipeline of 9+ launched companies and more in stealth.

## Why Work Here

- **Remote-First Culture**: Most roles are fully remote, though some require occasional travel to the Washington, D.C. office or other locations. [careers page]
- **Comprehensive Benefits**: 100% employer-paid medical, dental, and vision; 14 weeks of paid parental leave at full salary; unlimited PTO (with manager approval); 401K and FSA; professional development budget.
- **Hiring Process**: 4–6 weeks; includes a written application, an initial screen, a skills assessment (live or take-home), peer interviews, and an executive interview. The firm emphasizes “we hire the best and the brightest at every level.” 
- **Culture**: Values include Dedicated, Thorough, Principled, Collaborative, Resilient, Bold, and Visionary. The firm describes itself as mission-first and “safe-to-fail” – action-oriented and focused on learning from mistakes.

## Sources

1. [redcellpartners.com - Home](https://www.redcellpartners.com/)
2. [redcellpartners.com - Careers](https://www.redcellpartners.com/careers/)
3. [redcellpartners.com - About](https://www.redcellpartners.com/about/)
4. [redcellpartners.com - Our People](https://www.redcellpartners.com/our-people/)
5. [linkedin.com/company/red-cell-partners](https://www.linkedin.com/company/red-cell-partners)

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