Senior AI Engineer

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

Benefits offered by this job

ESOP participation

401(k) plan

Flexible work schedules

Tuition reimbursement

Co-sponsored health plan

Paid leave

Job summary

Technology Service Corporation is seeking a Senior Ontology Engineer in Dahlgren, Virginia. This role focuses on designing, developing, and maintaining ontological frameworks and knowledge graph solutions for defense mission engineering programs. Candidates should have the ability to obtain a SECRET DoD Clearance and experience with knowledge graph technologies.

The position requires collaboration with systems architects and mission-domain SMEs to translate operational requirements into actionable ontological models.

Comprehensive benefits and competitive salary are offered, including flexible work schedules and tuition reimbursement.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and developing end-to-end knowledge graph and AI data pipelines.
• Ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance.
• U.S. Citizenship required.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain formal ontologies using OWL, RDF/RDFS, and SPARQL.
• Build knowledge graph solutions integrating structured and unstructured data.
• Collaborate with engineers and S.M.E.s to translate requirements into ontological models.

Skills

Knowledge graph technologies

RDF

SPARQL

Python

NLP

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related discipline

PhD with 2+ years of relevant experience

MA/MS with 5+ years

BA/BS with 7+ years

Tools

Graph databases (Stardog, Neo4j, Amazon Neptune)

ETL pipeline tools (Apache NiFi, Airflow)

Web development frameworks (FastAPI, Flask)

Job description

TSC is seeking a Senior Ontology Engineer in King George/Dahlgren, Virginia to support the Systems Engineering & Analysis Division (SEA). The role requires designing, developing, and maintaining ontological frameworks and knowledge graph solutions for defense mission engineering programs. The candidate must have the ability to obtain and maintain a SECRET DoD Clearance.

Responsibilities

• 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’s adoption of AI technologies.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Science, Knowledge Engineering, or a related discipline; or equivalent experience.
• PhD with 2+ years of relevant experience, MA/MS with 5+ years, or BA/BS with 7+ years of experience.
• 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.
• U.S. Citizenship required.

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, guiding junior engineers and collaborating 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.

Job Details

Job Type: Regular. Schedule: Full time (40 hr/week). Travel: 0‑10%. Security Clearance: Secret (ability to obtain required).

Benefits

TSC offers a stable work environment, a competitive salary, and a comprehensive benefit package, including ESOP participation, a 401(k) plan, flexible work schedules, tuition reimbursement, co‑sponsored health plan, paid leave, and more.

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