Associate AI/ML Data Scientist (Systems Architecture, Associate) (Agentic AI)

Location: Reston, Virginia, United States; on-site schedule required

Salary: $150,000–$180,000 per year

Company

Provides cyber, engineering, financial management, and information technology solutions, including services for federal government customers.

What you will do

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

Requirements

• 8+ 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; data pipelines for machine learning; vector databases; embedding pipelines; retrieval systems; RAG; CI/CD; orchestration; infrastructure automation; and observability.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Data Science, or a related quantitative discipline, or equivalent additional experience.
• Current Top Secret/SCI with CI Polygraph clearance required.

Nice to have

• Experience as a Principal Engineer, Lead Data Engineer, Solution Architect, or Technical Lead.
• Experience operating vector search, RAG, knowledge management, and LLM-based platforms at enterprise scale.
• Experience with large-scale distributed data processing frameworks and engineering team leadership.
• Experience supporting AI adoption in government, defense, intelligence, or highly regulated organizations.
• Familiarity with AI governance, model evaluation, explainability, and responsible AI practices.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with health, life, disability, and retirement plans.
• Paid time off, professional growth opportunities, and tuition assistance.
• Collaborative, people-first workplace focused on employee support and development.
• No travel required.