AI Engineer with Security Clearance

Senior/Principal AI Engineer, Machine Learning Systems (Active TS/SCI with CI Poly, Contingent Upon Award)
SynMax, Inc. National Capital Region, on-site | Full-time employee | Senior $160,000 to $190,000 / Principal
$190,000 to $225,000 | Contingent upon award, anticipated late 2026 to early 2027 About SynMax
SynMax is a Houston-based maritime intelligence company. Our Theia platform fuses synthetic aperture radar, radio frequency, AIS, and electro-optical data to deliver multi-INT maritime domain awareness to
U.S. Government and commercial customers.

Theia is fielded and operational today, and this program will extend its capabilities into a classified environment for an Intelligence Community customer. The Role
We are seeking a Senior/Principal AI Engineer to build, deploy, and operate the machine learning systems on a program that brings the Theia platform into a classified environment for an Intelligence
Community customer. Theia’s detection, fusion, and attribution models are proven on commercial data.

Your job is to make them perform against the customer’s classified data holdings and sensors, which means adapting existing models, training new sensor-specific models on the high side, and measuring performance rigorously enough that customer analysts trust the output. You will work alongside the program’s data scientists, AI engineers, and platform engineers and remain connected to SynMax’s unclassified data science team. You will join a small team of customer-side engineers working directly in the customer’s classified environment.

Your first weeks will include focused knowledge transfer with
SynMax’s Theia engineering team. This role is open at the Senior or Principal level. A Senior AI Engineer independently designs, builds, and deploys ML and AI components within an established architecture. A Principal AI Engineer owns that architecture and the end-to-end AI system, makes build and design trade-offs that span teams, sets engineering standards for the high-side environment, and leads and reviews other engineers’ work.

What You Will Do • Support the program’s data scientists in porting, validating, and tuning Theia’s core analytics, including vessel detection, multi-INT fusion, attribution, and anomaly detection, for operation on classified data in the customer’s environment • Support the program’s data scientists in training new sensor-specific detection and characterization models against government-furnished imagery and signals data, including electro-optical and synthetic aperture radar sources • Package and deploy Theia’s models as production services in the customer’s environment, including GPU-accelerated inference pipelines, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining workflows • Implement evaluation frameworks and ground truth datasets designed by the program’s data scientists, and report detection rates, false alarm rates, and attribution accuracy in terms customer analysts can act on • Productionize the program’s data scientists’ advanced analytics for maritime behavior, including pattern of life modeling, deceptive behavior detection, and cross-sensor correlation , • Operate within the compute, data access, and tooling constraints of an air-gapped environment, including managing model artifacts, dependencies, and reproducibility without external connectivity • Document model lineage, training data provenance, and performance to support customer review and any model governance requirements • Collaborate with customer analysts to turn mission questions into analytic approaches and with the program’s platform engineer to move models into production pipelines • Contribute to full-stack work across the team, including the deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of the customer-side data and model pipelines

What You Bring • Advanced degree in a quantitative field or equivalent experience, and extensive applied data science or machine learning experience, with at least two years in a classified environment • Hands-on experience training and deploying computer vision or signal processing models on remote sensing data, specifically synthetic aperture radar or electro-optical imagery • Strong Python skills and fluency with the standard scientific and machine learning stack, including PyTorch or TensorFlow, and with GPU-accelerated training • Experience deploying and serving machine learning models in production, including containerized, Kubernetes-based services and GPU-accelerated inference • Experience working with large geospatial and time series datasets, including AIS or comparable vessel movement data • Demonstrated rigor in model evaluation, including building ground truth, handling class imbalance, and communicating uncertainty to non-specialist users • Experience delivering ML engineering work in an environment without internet access, including dependency management and reproducible environments • Comfortable working in a fast-paced, startup-style environment, where you will be expected to pitch in on all aspects of on-prem work, not only modeling • Experience owning delivery end to end, including deploying models and working with databases, and working independently with government customers Preferred • Experience with national technical means imagery or with fusing commercial and government sensor data • Experience with multi-sensor data fusion, track association, or entity resolution • Familiarity with maritime domain awareness problem sets, including dark vessel detection and AIS spoofing Contingent Upon Award
This position is contingent upon contract award.

Anticipated award is between late 2026 and early 2027. SynMax intends to extend contingent offers to selected candidates in advance of award so that the team is in place at program start. Contingent offers become effective only upon award, and no employment or compensation begins until that time. Candidates should be available to start within 30 days of award. Clearance and Eligibility , • Active Top Secret clearance with SCI eligibility is required.

Candidates must hold a current TS/SCI at the time of application, with an investigation or continuous vetting enrollment that is in scope and eligible for crossover. • This position does not offer clearance sponsorship or upgrade. Candidates without a current, active TS/SCI will not be considered. • U.S. citizenship is required. • Candidates must hold a successful counterintelligence polygraph completed within the last three years. Current or recent work on a TS/SCI NGA program with an NGA-administered polygraph is strongly preferred.

Employment Type and Location
This is a full-time employee position. The base salary range is $160,000 to $190,000 at the Senior level and $190,000 to $225,000 at the Principal level, with the level and offer determined by assessed scope, skills, and experience. Work is performed on site in the National Capital Region at a government or prime contractor facility. This position is not remote. Occasional travel to SynMax offices in Houston may be required for unclassified integration work. SynMax is hiring for two positions in this role.

Equal Opportunity
SynMax, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.