AI Engineer - Mission Innovation Lab

About this role

At the SEI AI Division, we conduct research in applied artificial intelligence and the engineering questions related to the practical design and implementation of AI technologies and systems. We currently lead a community-wide movement to mature the discipline of AI Engineering for Defense and National Security.  

As our government customers adopt AI and machine learning to   provide   leap-ahead mission capabilities, we  

• build real-world, mission-scale AI capabilities through solving practical engineering problems  

• discover and define the processes, practices, and tools to support operationalizing AI for robust, secure, scalable, and human-centered mission capabilities  

• prepare our customers to be ready for the unique challenges of adopting, deploying, using, and   maintaining   AI capabilities  

• identify   and investigate emerging AI and AI-adjacent technologies that are rapidly transforming the technology landscape    

Are you creative, curious, energetic, collaborative, technology-focused, and hard-working? Are you interested in making a difference by bringing innovation to government organizations and beyond? Apply to join our team.    

Overview  

As an AI Engineer who thrives at the intersection of deep‑learning research and production‑grade software development, you will translate cutting‑edge AI concepts into robust, mission‑scale solutions for the   warfighting   community. You will work comfortably with large‑scale foundation models such as GPT and   LLaMA , designing and deploying agentic workflows, as well as apply and advance traditional   ML   research and engineering across domains such as natural   language processing, computer vision, time   series forecasting, and other predictive analytics. You will collaborate closely with senior researchers, software engineers, and government sponsors to define problem statements, iterate on experimental designs, and deliver secure, reliable AI capabilities that meet stringent   mission   requirements.  

The Mission Innovation Lab within the SEI’s AI Division works with the defense and national security community to translate   the   “ recently   possible” in AI into reliable mission and warfighting capabilities.  

Key Responsibilities     

• De sign, de velop ,   and fine ‑ tune   a variety of AI model s .    

• Design autonomous agents and multi ‑ step pipelines using   LangChain ,   ReAct , tool ‑ calling, or custom orchestration; employ the Model Context protocol to manage stateful interactions .    

• Build Retrieval ‑ Augmented Generation pipelines that combine external knowledge bases with LLMs to improve factual accuracy for   warfighting   applications .    

• Implement end ‑ to ‑ end data pipelines, ETL processes, and back ‑ end services (Python, C/C++, Java) that feed data to models .    

• Create CI/CD pipelines for model training, validation, containerized deployment (Docker/Kubernetes), and security scanning;   maintain   model registries, monitoring, and version control of context protocols .    

• Produce rapid prototypes, run benchmarks, and conduct robustness/adversarial testing in realistic environments.  

• Work closely with senior ML engineers, software developers, and government customers; mentor junior staff and contribute to design reviews and documentation .    

• Stay current with emerging LLM architectures, agentic paradigms, PEFT/ LoRA   methods, and AI ‑ safety techniques; translate new research into operational capabilities .    

Required Qualifications     

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science ,   Machine Learn ing, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related field with at least eight (8) years of relevant experience, or a MS degree in the same with at least five (5) years of relevant experience.    

• You will be subject to a background investigation and must be able to obtain and   maintain   an active Department of   War   ( Do W ) security clearance.    

• You must be able and willing to work onsite 5 days per week at an SEI office in either Pittsburgh, PA or Arlington, VA.

• Proficiency   in Python and at least one compiled language (C/C++ or Java); experience with REST/ GraphQL   APIs and containerization.   

• Strong grasp of   ML   theory (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning) and evaluation metrics.   

• Hands ‑ on experience fine ‑ tuning LLMs and using frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers,   LangChain , or comparable agent tools.   

• Familiarity with building RAG pipelines (vector stores, dense/sparse retrievers).   

• Experience applying PEFT/ LoRA   methods (e.g.,   LoRA , adapters) to large models.   

• Understanding of Model Context protocols for managing model state across multi ‑ turn interactions.   

• Experience building evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, or data quality pipelines  

• Experience with TensorFlow,   PyTorch , or JAX; knowledge of data ‑ pipeline tools (Airflow, Prefect, Ray) is a plus.   

• Awareness of   DevSecOps   practices (CI/CD,   GitOps , container security scanning, model ‑ registry concepts) is desirable.  

Desired Experience     

• Deploying LLM APIs ( FastAPI ,   gRPC ) at scale, handling   latency   and load balancing.   

• Building multi ‑ tool agents, planner ‑ executor loops, or tool ‑ calling pipelines for complex decision ‑ making.   

• Conducting adversarial testing, implementing input sanitization, and contributing to AI ‑ safety research.   

• Utilizing GPU/TPU resources, mixed ‑ precision training, and distributed training frameworks such as   DeepSpeed   or   ZeRO .   

• Prior work on defense, intelligence, or government ‑ focused AI projects and familiarity with   Do W   acquisition or compliance processes.   

• Contributing to open ‑ source AI   and   ML   libraries, agentic frameworks, or context ‑ protocol implementations.  

Knowledge, Skills, & Abilities     

• Analytical thinking: decompose complex AI problems into tractable components and iterate rapidly

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