Senior AI Software Engineer
About The Position
GDIT is hiring a Senior AI Software Engineer to build AI applications and agents for the operations team and end users of the cloud platform supporting the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The role serves as the AI developer expert on a team of platform, DevOps, and security engineers, working with developers and government stakeholders to deliver secure, reliable AI capabilities in a federal cloud environment. The engineer will design, develop, and integrate software using large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, document processing, and AI agents. Work includes an integrated AI assistant for end users and agents that automate platform operations and perform approved tasks, as well as building new capabilities and improving existing services for performance, reliability, security, and user experience. This is a hands-on software engineering role spanning backend development, model integration, data processing, automated testing, and deployment. It requires a foundation in software engineering, Python, API integration, containerization, and AI application architecture. The position is fully remote, requires obtaining and maintaining a Public Trust, and requires onsite fingerprinting at a designated facility. The investigation may review personal and criminal behavior, financial conduct, foreign influence, and other adjudications.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
- One of the following experience paths: 7 or more years of professional software engineering, including at least 1 year building LLM-based applications; or 5 or more years of AI or ML application development, including at least 2 years with LLMs.
- At least one LLM application built and supported in production that goes beyond a simple chat interface, such as tool calling, RAG, agents, or multi-step workflows.
- Experience with agent frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Strands Agents, or CrewAI.
- Strong Python skills, with experience building APIs and backend services, and with Git, automated testing, and code review.
- Experience with major model providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure AI, or Amazon Bedrock.
- Experience deploying and debugging applications in the cloud with containers and CI/CD.
- Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with LLM evaluation, tracing, and prompt versioning tools such as LangSmith, Langfuse, or Ragas.
- Model Context Protocol (MCP) server development and integration.
- AWS experience, including Amazon Bedrock or Bedrock AgentCore, or relevant AWS certifications such as Solutions Architect Professional or Generative AI Developer Professional.
- Experience fine-tuning or customizing foundation models; knowledge of knowledge bases and vector stores.
- Infrastructure as code experience with Terraform.
- Experience with containerized microservice architectures.
- Experience supporting scientific research, federal government, healthcare, or similarly regulated environments.
Responsibilities
- Build and deploy LLM-based applications and agents, including APIs, backend services, tool calling, structured outputs, and multi-step workflows.
- Build RAG and document processing pipelines covering ingestion, embeddings, vector search, and reranking.
- Build evaluation into every release using test datasets, regression tests, quality metrics, and human review.
- Work with platform and DevOps engineers to run solutions in production using CI/CD, containers, monitoring, and cost controls.
- Work with security engineers on access control, audit logging, PII handling, approval steps for AI actions, and federal authorization (ATO) documentation.
- Produce technical documentation, architecture diagrams, deployment procedures, and operational runbooks.
- Advise stakeholders, communicate technical tradeoffs and recommended approaches to technical and non-technical audiences, and mentor other engineers.
Benefits
- Medical plan options, some with Health Savings Accounts.
- Dental plan options.
- Vision plan.
- 401(k) plan with pre-tax and post-tax contribution options and company match.
- Full flex work weeks where possible.
- Paid time off plans, including vacation, sick and personal time.
- Paid holidays.
- Paid parental leave and a Paid Family Leave program offering up to 160 hours in a rolling 12-month period for eligible employees.
- Military, bereavement, and jury duty leave.
- Typically 15 days of paid leave per calendar year for new employees, prorated based on hire date.
- Typically 10 paid holidays per year, prorated based on hire date.
- Short- and long-term disability benefits.
- Life, accidental death and dismemberment, personal accident, critical illness, and business travel and accident insurance are provided or available.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
