Platform/Infrastructure Eng.,Conversational AI & Immersive Character

Lockheed Martin•Orlando, CO

1d•Remote

About The Position

Lockheed Martin's Enterprise Business & Digital Transformation (EBDT) organization is advancing its Conversational AI and Immersive Character capabilities in support of training utilities, digital twin applications, employee assistants, and enterprise-wide productivity tools. The Advanced Solutions Division within EBDT is seeking a Platform / Infrastructure Engineer to build, operate, and scale the cloud-native infrastructure that powers these capabilities across the enterprise. You will be responsible for the reliable, secure, and cost-efficient operation of the Conversational AI platform — from Kubernetes-based hosting and container orchestration to SDK distribution pipelines, cloud render streaming, and observability. This individual will design and maintain the infrastructure that enables application teams across Lockheed Martin to consume AI character services at scale, while ensuring that all platform operations meet enterprise security, compliance, and performance standards. As the AI tooling landscape evolves rapidly, this role demands an engineer who can build loosely-coupled, vendor-neutral infrastructure that is resilient to platform changes. The Platform Engineer works closely with the Systems/AI Architect to implement architectural direction, with integration developers to ensure smooth SDK delivery, and with knowledge and character teams to provide the hosting backbone for character management, inference, and session orchestration services.

Requirements

Must be a US Citizen
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Systems Engineering, or a related technical professional experience or equivalent experience in lieu of degree
Hands-on experience deploying and operating containerized workloads on Kubernetes (EKS, OpenShift, or equivalent)
Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, Helm, Ansible, or equivalent)
Experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI, Jenkins, or equivalent) including artifact scanning and promotion workflows
Strong understanding of networking, load balancing, TLS, and API gateway configuration in cloud environments
Experience with container image security scanning and compliance (CIS benchmarks, vulnerability management)
Understanding of applied AI techniques including prompt engineering, utilization of code assistants, proper selection of foundation models for specific use cases, and a basic understanding of RAG and other knowledge recall patterns
Proficiency with monitoring and observability tooling (Splunk, ELK, Prometheus/Grafana, or equivalent)
Strong troubleshooting and incident response skills
Must be US Citizen

Nice To Haves

Experience with cloud render streaming technologies (NVIDIA CloudXR, Pixel Streaming, or equivalent)
FinOps certification or demonstrated experience with cloud cost optimization, chargeback models, and capacity forecasting
Experience managing artifact repositories (Nexus, Artifactory) and SDK/package distribution at enterprise scale
Familiarity with GPU-accelerated workloads and inference serving infrastructure (NVIDIA Triton, vLLM, or equivalent)
Experience with WebSocket/gRPC streaming for real-time conversational or voice interaction workloads
Knowledge of 3D engine ecosystems (Unreal Engine, Unity) and their deployment/packaging requirements
Experience with ServiceNow automation, Active Directory integration, and SCIM-based user provisioning
Familiarity with air-gapped or classified environment deployment patterns
Experience with enterprise secrets management (HashiCorp Vault or equivalent)
Prior experience in aerospace & defense or large-scale enterprise IT environments
Understanding of ITAR, CUI, and classified network requirements

Responsibilities

Deploy, configure, and maintain the Conversational AI platform on enterprise Kubernetes clusters (EKS / OpenShift), including inference containers, session management services, and API gateway layers
Design and operate horizontal pod autoscaling, load balancing, and capacity management to support enterprise-wide concurrent usage targets
Build and maintain the SDK distribution pipeline — ingesting vendor packages (Convai), running CIS security scans, and publishing validated artifacts to internal Nexus repositories in both raw and LM Integration variants
Manage GitLab-hosted starter templates and CI/CD pipelines for Web, Unity, and Unreal SDK tracks
Implement and operate cloud render streaming infrastructure for immersive and 3D character experiences delivered to thin clients, browsers, and XR devices
Establish and maintain FinOps practices — monitoring infrastructure costs, identifying optimization opportunities, forecasting capacity needs, and reporting cost-per-interaction and total cost of ownership metrics
Configure and maintain environment strategy across development, staging, production, and future classified enclaves, including network segmentation, encryption (TLS 1.3), and access controls
Implement container image security scanning as part of the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring all deployed images meet CIS benchmark requirements
Build and maintain the observability stack — centralized logging (Splunk/ELK), alerting on latency and error thresholds, health monitoring with readiness/liveness probes, and capacity dashboards
Manage CDN / edge caching for avatar assets, animations, and static SDK resources
Design and implement disaster recovery and failover strategies with defined RTO/RPO targets
Support the MyAccess and ServiceNow integration for automated user provisioning to the Convai platform
Collaborate with the security team on ISO 27001 alignment, audit logging, CUI/PII data handling, and preparation for classified environment deployment
Participate in on-call rotation and incident response for platform availability issues