AI Engineer

Clearance Level

Other

Category

Data Science and Data Engineering

Location

Sterling, the USA

(Onsite Workplace)

Key Skills For Success

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Machine Learning (ML)

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

REQ#: RQ226699

Public Trust: None

Requisition Type: Regular

Your Impact

Own your opportunity to work alongside federal civilian agencies. Make an impact by providing services that help the government ensure the well being and support of U.S. citizens.

Job Description

Job Description:

As an AI/ML Engineer Associate, the work you’ll do at GDIT will be impactful to the mission of the Diplomatic Security Bureau of the Department of State. You will play a crucial role as part of a team to develop, implement and maintain an AI powered solution leveraging existing Department of State data and reports that will deliver insights and assist in decision making for Diplomatic Security Leaders and Analysts.

Core responsibilities:

RAG Pipeline Development & Maintenance

Implement and iterate document ingestion, chunking, and embedding pipelines (e.g., Nomic Embed v1.5)

Tune retrieval parameters (chunk size, overlap, top-k, similarity thresholds) against evaluation sets

Maintain and troubleshoot the vector store (PGVector on PostgreSQL) - indexing, query performance, schema updates

Model Serving & Inference Support

Support day-to-day operation of the LLM serving layer

Assist with model updates, version testing, and rollback procedures

Monitor GPU utilization, memory usage, and inference latency

Application Integration

Work within front-end integrations to wire up new features, prompt templates, or tool-calling workflows

Build and maintain API integrations between the LLM layer and downstream applications (via PGBouncer/Postgres, Redis caching, etc.)

Write and refine system prompts, few-shot examples, and prompt-engineering iterations for specific use cases

Evaluation & Quality

Build/run evaluation harnesses to test retrieval accuracy and generation quality (hallucination checks, relevance scoring)

Track regressions when models, embeddings, or chunking strategies change

Document known failure modes and edge cases

Infrastructure support (Junior level)

Assist with environment setup, dependency management, and container/service configuration in development environments

Support basic troubleshooting of Redis, PostgreSQL, PGAdmin as they relate to the RAG pipeline

Escalate deeper infra/networking issues to senior engineers or platform team

Test Strategy & Planning

Contribute to a test strategy for the RAG/LLM pipeline covering three distinct layers: retrieval quality (are the right chunks being pulled), generation quality (is the LLM producing accurate, grounded, non-hallucinated answers), and system/integration (does the pipeline work end-to-end under real conditions)

Help define acceptance criteria for "good enough" retrieval and generation - e.g., minimum relevance score thresholds, acceptable hallucination rate, latency SLAs

Participate in test planning for new features or model/embedding swaps - identify what could break (retrieval drift, prompt regressions, latency changes) before rollout

Maintain a golden/reference dataset of representative queries and expected answers or expected retrieved sources, used as a stable benchmark across changes

Test Execution

Execute manual exploratory testing for new features or edge cases automation doesn't yet cover - adversarial prompts, out-of-scope questions, ambiguous queries, multi-turn context handling

Run pre-deployment validation checklists before pushing model, prompt, or pipeline changes to production

Execute periodic regression passes on a schedule (not just at release time) to catch silent drift - since RAG/LLM systems can degrade without any code change (e.g., underlying model provider updates, data staleness)

Validate fixes against the original defect/failure case plus the broader regression suite

Defect management

Documentation & knowledge transfer

Maintain technical documentation for pipelines, configs, and architecture decisions

Document runbooks for common operational tasks (restarting services, common errors, model swap procedures)

Collaboration

Collaborate with senior engineers on architecture decisions

Participate in code review, both giving and receiving feedback

Communicate technical constraints/tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders as required

Technical Skills: Python, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, SQL, Data Science, PyTorch, Docker, TensorFlow, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Linux, JavaScript, MATLAB, Architecture, Data Analytics, Kubernetes, MSFT Azure Platform, Big Data, Hadoop, Visualization, Software Development, and Agile.

Work Requirements

Years of Experience

0 + years of related experience

may vary based on technical training, certification(s), or degree

Certification

Travel Required

Less than 10%

Salary and Benefit Information

The likely salary range for this position is $55,462 - $75,038. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.

Our Identity Verification Process

As part of the hiring process, we will ask you to complete an identity verification process that leverages advanced biometrics and artificial intelligence to ensure authenticity and protect against identity fraud. You are expected to be on camera during virtual interviews. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud. By proceeding, you authorize the collection, processing, and use of your biometric data for identity verification and security purposes.

About Our Work

We are GDIT. A global technology and professional services company that delivers technology solutions and mission services to every major agency across the U.S. government, defense and intelligence community. Our 26,000 experts extract the power of technology to create immediate value and deliver solutions at the edge of innovation. We operate across 50+ countries worldwide, offering leading mission-ready capabilities in AI, cloud, cyber and software development.

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