Principal AI/ML Data Scientist (Systems Architecture, Senior Associate)

Location: On-site in Reston, Virginia, United States

Salary: $190,000–$245,000 per year

Company

Delivering cyber, engineering, financial management, and information technology solutions for federal government and other complex enterprise customers.

What you will do

• Architect, build, and maintain enterprise-scale data platforms for vector databases, semantic search, RAG, Agentic AI, and LLM applications.
• Establish data quality, lineage, source attribution, prompt and context traceability, explainability, and AI output evaluation controls.
• Lead architectural decisions balancing performance, scalability, security, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
• Work with data scientists, ML engineers, architects, cybersecurity teams, software engineers, and mission stakeholders to deliver production capabilities.
• Implement monitoring, observability, alerting, and continuous improvement for AI-supporting data platforms.
• Mentor engineers, evaluate emerging AI technologies, and communicate architectural tradeoffs to senior leadership.

Requirements

• 20+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, data engineering, distributed systems, cloud architecture, or AI/ML platform development.
• Experience delivering enterprise-scale AI, machine learning, generative AI, or Agentic AI solutions and production cloud-native data systems.
• Expert proficiency in Python and SQL, with strong knowledge of distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, MLOps, and AI platform engineering.
• Experience with Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud; vector databases, embedding pipelines, retrieval systems, RAG architectures, CI/CD, orchestration, infrastructure automation, and observability.
• Strong technical communication, stakeholder influence, consensus-building, and leadership abilities.
• Current Top Secret/SCI with CI Polygraph clearance is required. A bachelor's degree in a relevant quantitative discipline is required, with equivalent additional experience potentially accepted.

Nice to have

• Experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Data Engineer, Solution Architect, or Technical Lead.
• Experience operating enterprise-scale vector search, RAG, knowledge management, and LLM platforms.
• Large-scale distributed data processing experience and experience leading or mentoring engineering teams.
• Experience supporting AI adoption in government, defense, intelligence, or regulated organizations.
• Familiarity with AI governance, model evaluation, explainability, and responsible AI practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, life, disability, and retirement plans for full-time employees.
• Paid time off, professional growth opportunities, and tuition assistance.
• Collaborative, people-first workplace with support for employee development.
• No travel is required.