Senior AI Engineer

MITRE Corporation - McLean, VA

Full-time - Mid Level

McLean, VA

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

The Senior AI Engineer at MITRE Corporation will be responsible for developing interfaces and tools that leverage AI and Machine Learning technologies to address complex challenges in various domains such as healthcare, intelligence, and defense. This role emphasizes human-centered engineering practices to enhance collaboration between human teams and AI systems, ultimately aiming for greater outcomes. The engineer will work on the full AI lifecycle, from research and dataset creation to model training and production, while also advocating for appropriate AI solutions based on sponsor needs.

Responsibilities

• Assist MITRE and government sponsors in architecting and implementing solutions to solve challenging problems in domains such as healthcare, intelligence, and defense.
• Inform, advise, and advocate for appropriate AI solutions given sponsor demands, timelines, and computing infrastructure.
• Understand and practice the full AI lifecycle including initial research, dataset creation and evaluation, model training and evaluation, productionizing models, and building user-facing data visualization and web app prototypes.
• Help to enhance sponsor AI readiness across the dimensions specified by MITRE's AI Maturity Model: Ethical, Equitable, and Responsible Use, Strategy and Resources; Organization Culture and Structure; Technology Enablers; Data Management; and Performance and Application.
• Maintain awareness of the current State-of-the-Art techniques and actively look for ways in which they can be applied for MITRE and their sponsors.
• Lead small projects or have accountability for project tasks; planning and guiding the work of others in the technical development of AI research and solutions.
• Work independently and on teams to develop prototypes using modern AI and software engineering techniques with minimal instruction, guidance, and direction.

Requirements

• Typically requires a minimum of 5 years of related experience with a Bachelor's degree; or 3 years and a Master's degree; or a PhD with relevant experience who can immediately contribute at this job step; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.
• 4+ years of related experience with Python.
• Understanding of AI/ML algorithms and their appropriate applications.
• Experience with data processing libraries such as numpy, pandas, or similar.
• Experience with AI/ML libraries such as scikit-learn, HuggingFace, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and/or JAX.
• Strong fundamentals in software engineering, object-oriented programming, and software architecture and understanding of team software development best practices including git, documentation, code quality tools, issue and timeline tracking, and team collaboration.
• Ability to work independently to learn new technologies, techniques, processes, languages, platforms, and systems.
• Strong written and verbal communications skills.
• Ability to obtain and maintain DoD Secret clearance.

Nice-to-haves

• Active DoD Top Secret/SCI clearance.
• Master's Degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related degree.
• Experience implementing AI solutions using domain specific libraries (e.g., NLTK or LangChain for NLP, OpenCV for Images, etc.).
• AI Infrastructure Experience - hosting and serving AI models and familiarity with optimization technologies such as model runtimes and quantization.
• Data Engineering Experience - large data storage systems, databases, and data processing and ETL tools such as Nifi, PySpark, or similar.
• Results Presentation and Integration - ability to produce user facing applications such as dashboards, APIs (e.g., FastAPI or Flask), and/or prototype web front-ends (e.g., Streamlit, Dash).
• Application Development Experience with web development languages (HTML, CSS, JS) and modern frameworks (e.g., Vue, React, GO).
• Deployment Experience with DevOps tools such as GitLab or Jenkins CI/CD, Docker, or Kubernetes.

Benefits

• Competitive benefits
• Exceptional professional development opportunities
• Culture of innovation that embraces diversity, inclusion, flexibility, collaboration, and career growth