Security-Cleared AI Platform & Model Operations Lead

General Dynamics Information Technology; Chantilly (VA); On-site; USD 162,000 - 219,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Growth opportunities

Internal mobility support

Competitive pay

Job summary

General Dynamics Information Technology is seeking a hands-on AI Platform Operations Engineer to own and mature end-to-end platform and lifecycle for moving AI models and assets from development into classified production environments.

This role spans AI engineering, cloud/platform engineering, security, data, and Service Operations, ensuring robust, secure, and compliant AI capabilities in highly regulated settings; responsibilities include design of controlled release trains, observability,

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Information Technology, or related field, or approved equivalent experience.
• 8+ years of platform, DevSecOps, SRE, ML engineering, or cloud engineering experience, including 3+ years supporting production AI/ML platforms.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating local model-serving platforms such as vLLM, TGI, Triton, TensorRT-LLM, llama.cpp, Ollama, ONNX Runtime, or comparable technologies.
• Strong Linux, container, Kubernetes/OpenShift, networking, storage, GPU, identity, secrets, and infrastructure automation skills.
• Experience with model/artifact registries, experiment tracking, release management, CI/CD, internal package/container repositories, and disconnected dependency management.
• Ability to size inference capacity using model precision, VRAM, context length, concurrency, throughput, latency, and availability requirements.
• Strong Python and automation proficiency plus experience with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, GitLab CI/Jenkins, or comparable tooling.
• Working knowledge of RMF/STIG, software supply-chain security, SBOMs, vulnerability management, logging/audit, and classified data handling.
• Demonstrated technical leadership, incident judgment, cross-team coordination, mentoring, and clear documentation.

Responsibilities

• Design and operate AI/ML platform services for local model serving, orchestration, model and artifact registries, experiment/evaluation tracking, feature or retrieval assets, and deployment automation.
• Build controlled import and release workflows for model weights, containers, Python packages, libraries, prompts, datasets, and vulnerability updates in disconnected environments.
• Implement provenance, checksums/signing, SBOMs, malware/vulnerability scans, license review, allowlists, approvals, staged validation, and rollback for AI artifacts.
• Deploy and tune inference services using approved serving stacks; manage batching, concurrency, memory, quantization, autoscaling where available, queueing, resilience, and graceful degradation.
• Establish versioning and release relationships among model, tokenizer, prompt, retrieval index, embedding model, configuration, evaluation set, application, and infrastructure.
• Develop GPU/CPU/storage/network capacity models and advise on hardware options, consolidation, scheduling, and cost/performance trade‑offs.
• Implement health, latency, throughput, saturation, failure, quality, drift, and usage telemetry integrated with enterprise observability and ServiceNow.
• Define backup/recovery, continuity, patching, vulnerability treatment, certificate/secret rotation, and incident procedures for AI platform services.
• Partner with AI Assurance and Security to enforce use‑case gates, evaluation thresholds, audit, data restrictions, and release evidence.
• Lead technical reviews, troubleshoot production AI platform incidents, mentor engineers, and document reusable platform patterns.

Skills

AI/ML platform engineering

DevSecOps

Kubernetes/OpenShift

Python automation

CI/CD

Security/compliance

RMF/STIG/Vulnerability management

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science / Software Engineering / ML / IT or related field

Tools

vLLM

TGI

Trition

TensorRT-LLM

llama.cpp

Ollama

ONNX Runtime

Terraform

Ansible

Helm

GitLab CI/Jenkins

Kubernetes

Job description

General Dynamics Information Technology is seeking a hands-on AI Platform Operations Engineer to own and mature end-to-end platform and lifecycle for moving AI models and assets from development into classified production environments.

This role spans AI engineering, cloud/platform engineering, security, data, and Service Operations, ensuring robust, secure, and compliant AI capabilities in highly regulated settings; responsibilities include design of controlled release trains, observability,