Director of SPARKS: Prototyping & AI-Driven Innovation

Food Safety and Inspection Service; United States; On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Food Safety and Inspection Service seeks a Director for SPARKS in the Office of the Administrator. The role identifies, integrates, tests and deploys prototype systems and analytics tools to improve mission outcomes.

The selectee will stay at their current duty station and coordinate across executive program components to drive innovation with emerging technologies, including ML, cloud-native tools, and advanced data visualization.

Qualifications

• Time-in-grade: 52 weeks of service at the next lower grade level for promotion eligibility (example: 52 weeks at GS-14 for GS-15).
• One year of specialized experience demonstrating development to deliver prototype systems, dashboards, analytics platforms, and automation tools.
• Translating complex operational challenges into actionable technical requirements and user stories via stakeholder engagement, workflow mapping, and needs assessments.
• Coordinating across executive program components to drive innovation with emerging technologies (ML, LLMs, cloud-native tools, automation, data visualization).
• Applying strong program and project management to plan short- and long-term implementations and establish evaluation criteria.

Responsibilities

• Lead identification, integration, testing and deployment of prototype systems and analytics within FSIS.
• Engage stakeholders to map requirements and translate them into actionable deliverables.
• Drive innovation through emerging technologies such as ML, cloud-native tools, and advanced data visualization.

Job description

Food Safety and Inspection Service seeks a Director for SPARKS in the Office of the Administrator. The role identifies, integrates, tests and deploys prototype systems and analytics tools to improve mission outcomes.

The selectee will stay at their current duty station and coordinate across executive program components to drive innovation with emerging technologies, including ML, cloud-native tools, and advanced data visualization.