AI Data Analyst

Navaide•San Diego, CA

3d•$120,000 - $160,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Navaide is seeking a proactive, mid-to-senior Data Science / AI Analyst to accelerate adoption of generative AI, intelligent agents, and process automation for a Navy enterprise IT organization in San Diego. The analyst will partner with senior technical leadership to identify AI capability gaps, help shape a multi-year AI enablement strategy, and build prototypes that demonstrate measurable operational value. This is a hands-on engineering and strategic advisory role involving direct stakeholder engagement and delivery with limited oversight. The role is expected to grow as the organization’s AI maturity grows. The position is hybrid and requires the candidate to be local to San Diego, with regular on-site work at a government facility. The schedule combines remote and on-site days based on mission needs, follows a standard Monday–Friday workweek, and may include occasional travel to other government sites.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of professional data science experience, or a Master's degree and 10+ years of experience, in Data Science, Data Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
U.S. citizenship and eligibility to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government SECRET clearance.
Must be local to San Diego and able to work on-site at a government facility on a regular hybrid schedule.
Strong Python and SQL skills, including data pipeline development.
Hands-on experience building LLM applications, including retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool use, prompt engineering, and output evaluation.
Experience with Azure and/or AWS and data platforms such as Databricks.
Understanding of data governance, data quality, access control, and responsible AI practices.
Ability to explain technical findings in plain language to senior military and civilian leaders.
Ability to meet DoD cyber workforce qualification requirements (DoDM 8140.03).

Nice To Haves

Active SECRET clearance.
Experience with GenAI.mil or other DoD-accredited generative AI environments.
Experience across frontier model platforms, such as Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and OpenAI.
Model Context Protocol or similar agent-integration standards.
Experience with Advana, Jupiter, or similar federal/DoD data environments.
Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI) or MLOps experience.
Tactical edge or disconnected-environment data tooling experience.
Knowledge of DoD Responsible AI guidance and AI test and evaluation.
Prior Navy experience.

Responsibilities

Assess current and future AI capability gaps and develop technical papers, roadmaps, risk assessments, and actionable recommendations for leadership.
Evaluate and prioritize proposed AI use cases and drive high-value use cases from concept through delivery.
Evaluate commercial and open-source AI technologies, including large language models, agent frameworks, and automation platforms, through market research, proofs of concept, and migration planning.
Design, build, and test AI agents, retrieval-augmented knowledge bases, and workflow automations in secure, accredited cloud and generative AI environments.
Develop AI-enabled capabilities such as natural language querying, automated leadership summaries, document analysis, and decision-support recommendations.
Validate AI-generated outputs against source data, business rules, and subject matter expert feedback.
Develop data pipelines, integrations, and data quality controls that AI solutions depend on.
Help establish standards for AI governance, risk management, data quality, documentation, and responsible AI use.
Partner with functional subject matter experts, data owners, and field innovation teams to translate business needs into technical solutions.
Represent the team in cross-organizational AI and data working groups.
Deliver training and knowledge transfer to build self-service AI and analytics capability across user communities.
Present findings, prototypes, and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.