Bluestaq is a leader in enterprise software and secure data management, focused on building secure data platforms for various critical sectors. They are seeking a Principal AI Engineer, AI Security to develop secure and resilient AI solutions on their platform, leading a small team while serving as the technical authority on AI security across the full lifecycle.
Responsibilities:
- Serve as the AI Security technical authority on captures and bids. Translate mission-owner AI and AI-security requirements into solutions that win. Build credibility with technical buyers across the IC, DoD, and partners
- Own AI-assurance/security roadmap for the platform, spanning model security, runtime protection, and threat modeling for AI built on Bluestaq data. Partner with engineering to embed assurance by design
- Design and assure AI for the environments mission owners operate in, including disconnected, classified, and air-gapped settings where assurance cannot depend on continuous cloud connectivity
- Threat-model AI systems against the attacks that matter at this level: adversarial inputs, model extraction and distillation, data and supply-chain poisoning, and agentic or tool-use abuse
- Establish and carry the external voice on secure AI for national security through talks, writing, and demonstrated technical work
- Ensure delivered AI meets the assurance, TEVV, and supply-chain standards mission owners depend on, so trust drives expansion and renewal
- Connect AI-security work into Bluestaq's broader AI platform, so evaluation frameworks, model registries, and pipelines serve the whole program instead of a security-only silo
- Stay ahead of AI/ML advances and bring in the ones that offer real advantage here, not the ones that just make headlines
- Coach mission owners and non-technical stakeholders on what AI can realistically do, so expectations match reality before a program commits
- Spot gaps in Bluestaq's AI tooling, skills, or process before they become blockers, and drive the proposals that close them
- Hire and lead a small AI team as the pipeline grows
Requirements:
- Five or more years across AI security architecture, AI/ML engineering, or a closely related combination, with demonstrated specialization at the intersection of the two
- Hands-on experience securing modern AI systems: LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic or tool-using architectures, including MCP-style integrations
- Working command of the AI threat landscape and practical countermeasures, including where those countermeasures are weak and you compensate with architecture
- Cloud security depth, AWS preferred, including identity and workload isolation for model and inference traffic, preferably supporting large-scale Intelligence Community programs
- Ability to translate AI risk so a customer accreditor, a security auditor, and an engineer each understand it in their own terms
- The seniority to own a domain, set standards, and influence engineering decisions without direct authority
- U.S. citizenship and the ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Cybersecurity, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Active TS/SCI
- A public technical record in AI security: research, conference talks, open tooling, red-team writeups, or sustained content. We value the thinking shown, not just the resume
- Experience delivering and assuring AI in regulated or government environments
- Familiarity with the federal AI assurance landscape, including NIST AI RMF, TEVV, and the NSPM-11 mandate
- Secure AI/ML supply-chain experience: model and dataset provenance, third-party model risk, and the equivalent of an SBOM for models
- Experience standing up an AI or AI-security capability from zero and growing a team into it