Defense AI Engineer — Mission-Critical ML & NLP

Aptima; Woburn (MA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Aptima, a technology leader in national security, seeks an experienced AI/ML researcher in the Dayton area to design, develop, and apply advanced models that tackle mission-critical problems. You will work with real‑world datasets, fine‑tuning models and building systems that support defense objectives.

You will collaborate with researchers and engineers using PyTorch, TensorFlow, and LangChain, delivering production‑ready solutions that enhance military readiness and innovation.

Qualifications

• 3–5 years of relevant work experience.
• Ability to obtain US Government Security Clearance.
• Strong ML/AI fundamentals and software engineering practices.
• Experience with ML pipelines, NLP, LLMs, or CV is a plus.
• Proficiency in Python; Java and/or C# are a plus.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the design and development of AI and software systems that classify and measure human states using multimodal sensor approaches.
• Contribute to the design, development and application of data mining, statistical analysis, machine learning, computational modeling and digital signal processing methods.
• Collaborate with software engineers, within an agile development environment, to implement, test, and apply mathematical algorithms from research.
• Successfully design and implement the scientific and technical aspects of projects and proposals.
• Lead in the execution of technical tasks under projects and proposals, resulting in work that is timely and of high quality.
• Contribute to the production of Aptima technical reports, proposals, presentations, and published papers.
• Support more senior staff through the application of technical knowledge by contributing to proposals, participating in capabilities briefs, preparing software or meeting materials, integrating/installing software, meeting with customers, etc.
• Continue education in own professional domain (conferences, reading). Take initiative to do background reading and/or other forms of professional development related to project needs and technical areas.
• Present work at professional conferences and/or in professional publications.

Skills

Python

Java

C#

NLP

Computer Vision

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LangChain

ML/AI

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LangChain

Scikit-learn

Job description

Aptima, a technology leader in national security, seeks an experienced AI/ML researcher in the Dayton area to design, develop, and apply advanced models that tackle mission-critical problems. You will work with real‑world datasets, fine‑tuning models and building systems that support defense objectives.

You will collaborate with researchers and engineers using PyTorch, TensorFlow, and LangChain, delivering production‑ready solutions that enhance military readiness and innovation.