AI Delivery Engagement Lead (FS Poly Required)

augustschell; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

August Schell is seeking an AI Delivery Engagement Lead to sit at the front edge of an Intelligence Community customer's adoption of commercial AI. You scope use cases, run the delivery, and own the relationship between analysts and the platform, translating what they need into what the platform delivers.

This is a customer-facing delivery seat, credible in engineering discussions and capable of earning the customer’s trust by name.

Qualifications

• Active TS/SCI clearance with Full Scope Polygraph.
• Experience working at or with this customer and environment.
• Willingness to be forward-deployed to the customer's site.
• Able to learn quickly; commercial AI inside the fence is new ground.
• On-site work in McLean, VA.
• Technical foundation in CS/engineering/data science.

Responsibilities

• Scope AI and agentic-workflow use cases with mission customers.
• Own end-to-end delivery for those use cases including requirements and sequencing.
• Lead cross-functional teams spanning platform engineering, data operations and government stakeholders.
• Serve as the customer’s primary point of contact and manage relationship health.
• Translate mission requirements into technical scope and vice versa.
• Address data operations, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop workflow design.
• Identify patterns for repeatable delivery motions and expand the footprint.

Skills

Active TS/SCI clearance

Full Scope Polygraph

Experience with IC customers

On-site in McLean, VA

Technical foundation in CS/engineering

Structured problem solving

Strong written and verbal comms

Willingness to travel 25%

Tools

Python

SQL

MLOps tooling

Job description

August Schell is looking for an AI Delivery EngagementLeadto sit at the front edge of an Intelligence Community customer's adoption of commercial AI. This is the seat between a fast-moving AI platform and the mission users who have to trust it: you scope the use cases, run the delivery, and own the relationship — translating what the analysts actually need into what the platform actually does, and back again.

This is not a data-science benchroleand it is not a project-administration role. It is a customer-facing delivery seat for someone technical enough to be credible in an engineering conversation and social enough to be the person the customer asks for by name.

Individuals in this role must hold anactive TS/SCI with Full Scope Polygraphand be able to work on site in McLean, VA.

Responsibilities

• Scope AI and agentic-workflow use cases directly with mission customers — find the operational pain, size it, and shape it into something deliverable

• Own delivery end-to-end for those use cases: requirements, sequencing, cross-functional coordination, and the status conversation with the customer

• Lead cross-functional teams spanning platform engineering, data operations, and government stakeholders — without formal authority over most of them

• Serve as the customer's primary point of contact — run onboarding, manage relationship health, and surface risk before it becomes a problem

• Translate in both directions: mission requirements into technical scope for the engineering team, and technical constraints into plain language for government leadership

• Work model and data operations problems hands-on where needed — evaluation, quality, human-in-the-loop workflow design, and the operational plumbing around a model in production

• Identifypatterns worth standardizing and turn one-off delivery wins into a repeatable motion across the customer's organization

• Grow the account: spot adjacent use cases and expand the footprint from a first win into a program

Requirements

• Active TS/SCI clearance with Full Scope Polygraph— current and in scope

• Experience working at or with this customer— you know the environment, the pace, and how workactually getsapproved and fielded there

• A real appetite to learn and chase this— commercial AI inside the fence is new ground for everyone; we are looking for someone who wants to be early, not someone waiting for a mature playbook

• Ability to work on site in McLean, VA

• A technical foundation you can stand on — computer science, engineering, data science, statistics, economics, or equivalent hands-on experience. A formal AI/ML background is welcome but not required; the willingness to get deep in it is

• Structured problem solving — able to take an ambiguous mission problem and turn it into a scoped plan

• Strong written and verbal communication; comfortable briefing both engineers and senior government leadership

• Willingness to travel approximately 25% and to beforward-deployedto the customer's site

Stand out with

• Hands-on experience with modern AI/ML already — large language models, agentic workflows, model evaluation, prompt and context engineering, or the operational realities of running models against real data

• Python and/or SQLproficiency— you can pull the data and check the answer yourself

• MLOpsand model operations experience: evaluation pipelines, data labeling and quality, human-in-the-loop workflow design,monitoringin production

• Experience at an API or platform technology company — you know how a product team thinks and how to feed it

• Computer vision, ISR/FMV analytics, or multi-INT data experience

• A track recordof expanding a client relationship from one use case into a program

• Cloud and data platform experience at classified levels

• A track recordof building the second version of something — documentation, playbooks, and templates that outlive the first engagement