Forward Deployed Data Scientist

Govini•Pittsburgh, PA

5h•Remote

About The Position

We are seeking an inquisitive Data Scientist to join our team, leveraging deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence and a keen understanding of complex Defense Acquisition challenges. Your primary focus will be to work with our proprietary and commercial datasets to find critical connections, derive actionable knowledge, and identify potential issues that help our government clients make more informed decisions. Your role will involve designing, developing, and rapidly deploying scalable AI solutions that transform these insights into mission-critical capabilities. You will have the opportunity to expand and grow data-driven research across Govini, leading new areas to apply advanced analytics to drive strategic business and national security results. As part of our team, you must be an AI expert with a strong command of data science fundamentals and a proven ability to bring data-driven solutions to life within the defense ecosystem. In order to do this job well, you must be a highly organized problem-solver and possess excellent oral and written communication skills, capable of translating complex AI concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences. You are independent, driven, and motivated to jump in and roll up your sleeves to get the job done. You lead by influence and motivation. You have a passion for great work and nothing less than your best will do. You share our intolerance of mediocrity. You’re uber-smart, challenged by figuring things out and producing simple, impactful AI solutions to complex defense problems. Knowing there are always multiple answers to a problem, you know how to engage in a constructive dialogue to find the best path forward. You’re scrappy. We like scrappy. We need a creative, out-of-the-box thinker who shares our passion and obsession with quality and rapid prototyping/deployment. This role is a full-time position located out of our office in Arlington, VA, Pittsburgh, PA, or Remote. This role may require up to 75% travel.

Requirements

U.S. Citizenship is required
Ability to translate customer problems into technical AI requirements, and write down the documentation to be used by multiple teams.
Deep ability to embed with clients, understand vague business or national security challenges, and translate these customer problems into concrete, actionable technical requirements and detailed documentation for AI-based systems.
Expertise in rapidly prototyping models, heuristics, and agentic solutions. The ability to translate vague needs into concrete AI workflows and Data Science solutions, followed by deploying production-grade code and taking end-to-end ownership of the client's problem.
Skill in defining concrete AI workflows from vague requirements.
Experience evaluating and tuning AI solutions for effectiveness. Experience in measuring the impact of AI/DS solutions.
Competency in deploying code into production AI systems. Competency in building agent/skills solving particular problems.
Expertise in integrating AI/DS solutions into agentic frameworks.
End-to-end ownership of client problems.
Strong communication with non-technical users and technical users.
Collaboration with cross-functional teams for production deployment.
Strong collaboration and communication skills to work effectively with AI platform and data engineering teams. This includes generalizing unique AI/DS solutions into reusable agentic features/skills and integrating them into agentic frameworks for other production deployments.

Nice To Haves

A strong publication record in the top conferences in one of the AI, ML, NLP, or decision science areas
Deep knowledge of LLM and Agentic system evaluation, experience in building evaluation systems
Extensive expertise in specialized domains such as Operations Research, Optimization, and Decision Science.
Track record of successfully transitioning AI research prototypes into robust, production-grade enterprise solutions

Responsibilities

Developing new AI methods and using existing ones to solve complex defense problems
Developing working AI systems and deploying them
Rapid prototyping of AI models, systems, heuristics, and agentic solutions
Working directly with customers to understand and solve their problems
Translating customer problem definitions into technical requirements for AI-based systems
Translating vague customer needs into concrete AI workflows and Data Science solutions
Evaluating solution effectiveness with customers, tuning, and redefining solutions when needed
Deploying code into production AI systems
Taking end-to-end ownership of client problems
Communicating clearly with both non-technical and technical users
Working with AI platform, agentic AI, and data engineering teams to build end-to-end solutions in production deployments
Collaborating with AI platform and agentic AI teams to generalize capabilities into reusable agentic AI features/skills for other deployments
Wrapping AI/DS solutions into AI agentic/skills frameworks
Create agentic AI systems, using AI orchestrators and particular AI reasoning capabilities as tools.