AI Engineer SME

AnaVation•Chantilly, VA

15h•Onsite

About The Position

AnaVation is seeking a highly skilled AI Engineer to lead research, design, development, and execution of specialized operational and analytic cyber capabilities in support of real-world missions. The position builds and deploys production AI, machine learning, and generative AI solutions, including models, pipelines, microservices, retrieval and LLM applications, and data systems. The role also supports AI governance, secure posture alignment, technical mentorship, and engineering standardization. The position is on-site in Chantilly, Virginia and requires an active Top Secret clearance, eligibility for SCI access, and the ability to obtain a CI polygraph.

Requirements

Active Top Secret (TS) clearance, eligibility for Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), and ability to obtain a Counterintelligence (CI) polygraph.
Bachelor's or master's degree and 10 years of experience specializing in AI/ML engineering.
Hands-on experience deploying production AI/GenAI and LLM systems, including embeddings, multimodel and multimodal orchestration, reasoning, memory, and tool execution.
Proficiency with PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and a cloud platform such as AWS, Azure, or GCP; practical MLOps experience with MLflow, Azure ML, or Vertex AI.
Experience implementing NLP, computer vision, reinforcement learning, temporal, spatial, geographic, or quantitative AI capabilities, including named entity recognition, contextual entity extraction, and entity resolution.
Experience developing multistep retrieval and structured-output workflows with source citations, provenance, and traceable analytic results.
Expertise in data architecture integrating vector, graph, and relational databases; automated ETL pipeline development, scheduling, and optimization; complex parsing; and schema-aligned ingestion and normalization of structured and unstructured data.
Experience implementing data-layer Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) and end-to-end data lineage tracking.
Experience supporting air-gapped, hybrid, and on-premises environments, including locally hosted GPU servers, hyperconverged infrastructure, container orchestration, distributed systems, and multitenant Cross-Domain Solutions (CDS).
Proficiency in full-stack development and integration using TypeScript, React, Python, FastAPI, LanceDB, Lance Graph, PostgreSQL, Temporal.io, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Ability to work on-site in Chantilly, Virginia.

Nice To Haves

Experience in federal, defense, or highly regulated environments.
Knowledge of ethical AI, governance frameworks, and secure development practices.
Skills in large-scale optimization, GPU acceleration, or distributed training.
Experience building APIs, microservices, and automated ML workflows.

Responsibilities

Build scalable, production-ready AI/ML/GenAI models, pipelines, and microservices.
Develop training, evaluation, and inference pipelines in Python using PyTorch, TensorFlow, or scikit-learn.
Deploy and manage models using MLOps, CI/CD, containerization, and monitoring frameworks.
Implement vector databases, embeddings, LLM applications, agentic AI, and tool-calling workflows.
Optimize models for accuracy, latency, cost, and scalability across distributed environments.
Ensure AI governance, documentation, ethical compliance, and secure posture alignment.
Provide technical mentorship and drive cross-team engineering standardization.
Develop and maintain production AI/GenAI and LLM systems, data architectures, ETL pipelines, and full-stack integrations.
Deliver and maintain solutions in agile engineering environments.