Mission AI Engineer — Defense Innovation Lab

Software Engineering Institute | Carnegie Mellon University; Pittsburgh (Allegheny County); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Software Engineering Institute | Carnegie Mellon University is seeking an AI Engineer who thrives at the intersection of research and production. You will translate cutting‑edge AI concepts into mission‑scale solutions, working with large models and agentic workflows.

Expect collaboration with researchers, engineers, and government sponsors on robust, secure AI capabilities. The role focuses on designing AI models, autonomous pipelines, and retrieval‑augmented generation, with hands‑on use of

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 5+ years or MS with 5+ years in related fields.
• Strong Python and one compiled language (C/C++ or Java).
• Experience fine-tuning LLMs and using LangChain or similar tools.
• Background investigation and ability to obtain DoW security clearance.
• Onsite work at SEI offices in Pittsburgh, PA or Arlington, VA.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and fine-tune a variety of AI models.
• Create autonomous agents and multi-step pipelines; manage stateful interactions.
• Build RAG pipelines and end-to-end data pipelines feeding models.
• Develop CI/CD pipelines, containerization, model registries, and security checks.
• Produce prototypes, benchmarks, and robustness testing; mentor staff.
• Collaborate with government sponsors and engineers; document designs.

Skills

Python

C/C++

Java

ML theory

PEFT/LoRA

LangChain

LLMs

ModelContext

REST/GraphQL

Docker/Kubernetes

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/ML/Math

MS degree

Tools

Hugging Face Transformers

LangChain

Docker

Kubernetes

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Airflow/Prefect/Ray

Job description

Software Engineering Institute | Carnegie Mellon University is seeking an AI Engineer who thrives at the intersection of research and production. You will translate cutting‑edge AI concepts into mission‑scale solutions, working with large models and agentic workflows.

Expect collaboration with researchers, engineers, and government sponsors on robust, secure AI capabilities. The role focuses on designing AI models, autonomous pipelines, and retrieval‑augmented generation, with hands‑on use of