AI/ML Engineer I

About the role

The organization operates within the federal and defense-adjacent technology space, addressing the challenge of developing and maintaining secure, reliable, and high-performing AI-enabled applications for government customers. It focuses on delivering AI solutions that meet stringent security and compliance standards, supporting critical workflows in production environments. The AI/ML ENGINEER I role is focused on the development, deployment, and operational support of AI systems that serve federal and defense-related clients. This position combines applied AI engineering and practical data science to ensure the reliability and performance of AI-enabled applications. The role is hands-on, emphasizing implementation, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement rather than research or leadership.

Responsibilities

• Develop, integrate, and maintain AI/ML components within secure production-grade applications
• Collaborate with customers and engineering teams to troubleshoot and resolve system defects
• Perform bug fixes, root cause analysis, and optimize AI service performance
• Diagnose and address data quality issues impacting model outputs
• Support data preprocessing, transformation, validation, and feature engineering
• Implement and optimize Large Language Model integrations in secure cloud environments
• Assist with prompt engineering, response evaluation, and model tuning
• Support retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and embedding workflows
• Participate in LLMOps practices including monitoring, logging, versioning, and performance tracking
• Evaluate model outputs for consistency, hallucination risk, bias, and reliability
• Integrate AI services via REST APIs into backend systems
• Contribute to observability, telemetry, and audit logging aligned with compliance
• Document technical implementations following secure development standards
• Other duties as assigned

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field
• 1–3 years of experience in AI/ML engineering, data science, or software development
• Strong proficiency in Python
• Experience troubleshooting structured and unstructured data issues
• Familiarity with data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model validation
• Hands-on experience with OpenAI or similar Large Language Model APIs
• Knowledge of foundational and smaller language models
• Experience with transformer-based architectures (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers)
• Understanding of embeddings, tokenization, fine-tuning, and inference workflows
• Experience integrating AI services into cloud environments (Azure preferred)
• Understanding of LLMOps concepts including monitoring, logging, prompt iteration, deployment
• Ability to debug model outputs and trace issues across data, prompts, and system integration
• Eligibility for U.S. Public Trust clearance

Skills

• Experience implementing retrieval-augmented generation and vector-based search systems
• Familiarity with vector databases such as FAISS, Pinecone, or Azure AI Search
• Exposure to containerization (Docker) and CI/CD practices
• Experience supporting AI systems in regulated or government environments
• Understanding of model evaluation metrics and performance benchmarking