Fulltime || Principal AI Engineer || Arlington, Virginia

Location: Arlington, VA onsite

Role: Own the reference architecture, design patterns, and engineering standards for how we build and deploy AI agents and ML systems across cloud and secure on-prem environments. Must be deeply hands-on - prototype, build, and harden the most complex and highest-risk components while setting the technical direction the rest of the team executes. Will be required to influence thru technical depth, not org authority.

Required:

• 10+ years in Software/ Data / ML Engineering with a track record as a senior individual contributor / technical leader
• 3+ years' experience leading technical teams
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying production AI/ML systems at scale
• Advanced experience with large language models. Self-hosting open-weight models, fine-tuning, quantization, and serving/inference optimization
• Demonstrated experience architecting agentic AI systems and orchestration patterns
• Expert-level Python and modern AI/ML tooling
• Strong experience across cloud and on-premises GPU infrastructure
• Proven ability to set technical direction and influence engineering decisions without direct authority
• Experience mentoring senior engineers

Desired:

• Databricks + Kafka experience
• Experience deploying AI/ML in or near operational technology (OT), industrial, or safety-critical environments
• Deep familiarity with agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, or custom orchestration)
• Experience building custom ML models (neural networks, smaller models) in addition to LLM systems
• Ontology / semantic modeling experience

Once again, this is a 100% fully onsite position. Please forward qualified candidate for review and don't hesitate advising if any questions.

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