Director, Applied AI & Data Science

Vantor • Herndon, VA

2d • $182,000 - $266,200

About The Position

Vantor is hiring a Director, Applied AI & Data Science to lead its Applied AI Science organization and advance spatial intelligence capabilities. The role sets and executes the Applied AI Science roadmap, turning customer, market, and mission needs into technical priorities, measurable milestones, and deployable AI capabilities. It leads a high-performing team working across geospatial AI, multimodal learning, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, predictive modeling, and production machine learning.

The Director champions agentic AI to accelerate research, experimentation, evaluation, documentation, code review, and production support, while establishing standards for safe, reliable, and auditable agent use. The role also advances near-zero-latency intelligence and decision systems, automated insight generation, self-service intelligence platforms, and AI-powered workflows for teams across the company.

This leader sets standards for experimentation, model evaluation, and evidence-based decisions; guides complex evaluation and causal reasoning; and oversees end-to-end AI/ML pipelines and production operations in partnership with Engineering. The role requires strong cross-functional influence and portfolio discipline, using evidence, customer feedback, model performance, and business impact to prioritize work and advise leaders. Applicants must be U.S. citizens eligible to obtain a security clearance and must hold an MS or PhD in a relevant technical field. The role is incentive eligible.

Requirements

• Must be a United States citizen and eligible to obtain a security clearance.
• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field.
• 10+ years of experience in machine learning, applied AI, data science, AI engineering, decision science, or a related technical discipline.
• 5+ years of experience leading technical teams, including applied scientists, machine learning engineers, AI researchers, data scientists, or comparable technical talent.
• Demonstrated experience building, deploying, and operating production AI/ML systems with measurable customer, product, operational, or business impact.
• Strong technical depth in several areas such as multimodal AI, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, agentic AI, computer vision, geospatial AI, remote sensing, predictive modeling, causal inference, experimentation, or large-scale ML systems.
• Experience building end-to-end ML systems, including data pipelines, training workflows, evaluation frameworks, scalable inference, model monitoring, and retraining.
• Experience defining experimentation standards, model evaluation frameworks, causal inference approaches, or launch-readiness criteria for AI/ML products.
• Strong understanding of modern AI infrastructure, including cloud-based ML platforms, distributed training, containerized deployment, model serving, dataset versioning, and experiment tracking.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and develop a high-performing team of Applied AI Scientists across geospatial AI, multimodal learning, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, predictive modeling, and production ML.
• Define and execute the Applied AI Science roadmap, translating customer, market, and mission needs into technical priorities, milestones, and deployable AI capabilities.
• Guide the design and productionalization of AI applications that transform geospatial, imagery, structured, and contextual data into actionable insights and decision intelligence.
• Champion agentic AI adoption to accelerate research, experimentation, evaluation, documentation, code review, and production support.
• Identify and automate high-friction scientific workflows to reduce cycle time while improving quality and repeatability.
• Establish standards for safe, reliable, and auditable use of AI agents across development and operational workflows.
• Drive a near-zero-latency intelligence culture and build a proactive intelligence operating model to identify market, customer, user, geopolitical, and operational signals and opportunities.
• Oversee automated insight-generation systems, self-service intelligence platforms, decision-support tools, and AI-powered workflows.
• Establish company-wide standards for experimentation, model evaluation, and evidence-based decision-making across AI, analytics, and product development.
• Provide senior technical guidance on causal inference, counterfactual analysis, A/B testing, benchmark design, offline model evaluation, human-in-the-loop assessment, and launch readiness.
• Define rigorous evaluation criteria for AI and ML systems, ensuring they are reliable, robust, explainable, and production-ready.
• Oversee end-to-end AI/ML pipelines, including ingestion, preprocessing, feature engineering, training, evaluation, inference, monitoring, and retraining.
• Partner with Engineering to transition models from prototype to production and establish ownership for deployment, serving, monitoring, incident response, lifecycle management, and improvement.
• Ensure AI systems support scalability, low latency, cost efficiency, security, reliability, reproducibility, and operational resilience on modern cloud infrastructure.
• Use data, experimentation, model performance, customer feedback, and business impact to prioritize the Applied AI Science portfolio.
• Secure cross-functional alignment for pivots, resource reallocations, changes in technical direction, and acceleration of higher-value opportunities.
• Advise Product, Engineering, Go-to-Market, Customer Success, Research, and executive leaders on evaluation, growth and adoption strategies, and investment decisions for AI-enabled products.

Benefits

• Robust 401(k) with company match.
• Mental health resources.
• Student loan repayment assistance.
• Adoption reimbursement.
• Pet insurance.
• Incentive eligibility, with a target based on contribution, company performance, and/or individual results.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director