Senior AI Engineer

Technology Service Corporation Defense Services; Dahlgren (VA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP participation

401k Plan

Flexible Work Schedules

Tuition Reimbursement

Paid Leave

Job summary

Technology Service Corporation Defense Services is hiring a Senior Ontology Engineer in Dahlgren, Virginia. This role will involve designing and maintaining formal ontologies, leveraging AI technologies, and collaborating on defense projects.

The ideal candidate possesses a strong background in knowledge engineering, ontology development, and artificial intelligence. TSC offers a competitive salary, benefits, and a supportive work environment, fostering individual growth.

Qualifications

• PhD with 2+ years of relevant experience or equivalent.
• Hands-on experience with knowledge graph technologies.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain formal ontologies.
• Collaborate to translate operational requirements into ontological models.
• Lead development for proposals regarding AI technologies.

Skills

Knowledge engineering

Ontology development

Artificial intelligence technologies

Python

RDF

SPARQL

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related discipline

PhD with 2+ years of experience

Tools

Graph database platforms (e.g., Stardog, Neo4j)

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Apache NiFi

Job description

TSC is seeking a Senior Ontology Engineer in King George/Dahlgren, Virginia. This position supports the Systems Engineering & Analysis Division (SEA).

Responsibilities

This position is designed to be flexible, with responsibilities evolving to meet program needs, emerging technology trends, and opportunities for individual professional growth.

This position requires a technically deep and mission-focused individual with expertise in knowledge engineering, ontology development, and artificial intelligence technologies applied to defense and mission engineering domains.

• Design, develop, and maintain formal ontologies using OWL, RDF/RDFS, and SPARQL aligned with DoD mission engineering requirements and semantic interoperability standards.
• Build and deploy knowledge graph solutions that integrate structured and unstructured data sources across heterogeneous, multi-domain defense systems.
• Apply and extend upper-level ontology frameworks, ensuring alignment with DoD and IC data standards.
• Design and implement graph-based AI and semantic solutions, including LLM-integrated pipelines, RAG architectures, and agentic workflows that leverage knowledge graph representations.
• Collaborate with engineers, systems architects, and mission-domain SMEs to translate operational requirements into actionable ontological models and knowledge architectures.
• Support semantic integration and data interoperability efforts across legacy and modern system architectures, including graph database deployments (e.g., Stardog, Neptune, Neo4j).
• Lead the development and writing of technical approaches for proposals related to supporting the Navy adopt AI technologies

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, or a related discipline; equivalent experience considered
• PhD with 2+ years of relevant experience, MA/MS with 5+ years of relevant experience, or BA/BS with 7+ years
  • Hands‑on experience with knowledge graph technologies including RDF, SPARQL, SHACL, and OWL for DoD or enterprise use cases
  • Experience with schema design, ontology management, and knowledge graph curation
  • Experience designing and developing end‑to‑end knowledge graph and AI data pipelines, including integration with LLMs or similar models
  • Familiarity with graph database platforms such as Stardog, Blazegraph, Neo4j, or Amazon Neptune
• Ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with U.S. Navy Combat Systems
• 2+ years of hands‑on Python experience, including frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, rdflib, or owlready2, and ETL pipeline tools (e.g., Apache NiFi, Airflow)
• Experience with full‑stack web development, including REST API design and development (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, or Node.js), front‑end frameworks (e.g., React or Angular), and containerization/deployment tooling (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)
• Practical experience with NLP, semantic search, prompt engineering, and LLMs for enterprise‑scale knowledge graph applications including RAG architectures.
• Experience with agentic AI systems and multi‑modal model integration applied to knowledge engineering problems
• Demonstrated team leadership experience, with the ability to guide junior engineers and collaborate across engineering, research, and program management teams
• PhD in Computer Science, Knowledge Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or a publication record in semantic web and knowledge representation

U.S. Citizenship Required for this Position: Yes

Job Type: Regular

Security Clearance: Secret (ability to obtain required)

Schedule: Full time (40 hr/week)

Travel: 0-10%

TSC Benefits

TSC offers a stable work environment, a competitive salary, and a comprehensive benefit package; including ESOP participation, 401k Plan, Flexible Work Schedules, Tuition Reimbursement, Co‑Sponsored Health Plan, Paid Leave and much more.

Applying to TSC

Only those candidates invited for an interview will be contacted. Employment at TSC is contingent upon the successful completion of a comprehensive background check, security investigation, and a drug screening.

This contractor and subcontractor shall abide by the requirements of 41 CFR 60-1.4(a), 60-300.5(a) and 60-741.5(a). These regulations prohibit discrimination against qualified individuals based on their status as protected veterans or individuals with disabilities, and prohibit discrimination against all individuals based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or for inquiring about, discussing, or disclosing information about compensation. Moreover, these regulations require that covered prime contractors and subcontractors take affirmative action to employ and advance in employment individuals without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.