Senior AI/ML Engineer

AKIVA AI, LLC; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development

401(k) with company match

Medical Insurance

Vision Insurance

Short-Term & Long-Term Disability

Job summary

AKIVA AI, LLC is seeking a senior engineer to lead development of production multi-agent systems and custom AI frameworks. You will architect distributed inference pipelines and mentor engineers on RLHF and agent evaluation.

You will partner with research and product teams to translate novel techniques into deployable systems for commercial and government clients, with a long-term contract engagement and opportunities for impact.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping production ML systems.
• Deep expertise in transformer internals, attention mechanisms, and modern inference optimization.
• Experience with at least one of: vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, custom CUDA/Triton kernels, distributed training (DeepSpeed/FSDP).
• Production experience with multi-agent frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) or equivalent custom orchestration.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: Python, type-safe APIs, testing, observability.

Responsibilities

• Architect and ship multi-agent orchestration systems (planner/executor, tool-use, reflection loops).
• Design and optimize custom inference stacks: kernel-level work (CUDA/Triton), quantization (GPTQ/AWQ/FP8), speculative decoding, paged attention, KV-cache engineering.
• Lead model serving infrastructure on vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or equivalent at production scale.
• Mentor engineers on reinforcement learning, RLHF/DPO, and agent evaluation methodology.
• Partner with research and product to translate novel techniques into shippable systems.

Skills

Production ML systems

Transformer internals

Inference optimization

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

CUDA kernels

Distributed training

LangGraph

AutoGen

CrewAI

Python

Testing

Observability

Education

PhD in CS/ML

Tools

CUDA

Triton

DeepSpeed

FSDP

Job description

AKIVA is an AI-native engineering firm specializing in enterprise services, domain-specific solutions, and high-performance infrastructure from strategy through deployment. We build innovative systems that drive measurable results for commercial enterprises and government agencies. AKIVA is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).

Position Overview

Lead development of production multi-agent systems and custom AI frameworks. Architect distributed inference pipelines, design agent orchestration patterns, and ship research-grade ML into resilient enterprise systems for commercial enterprises and government agencies.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and ship multi-agent orchestration systems (planner/executor, tool-use, reflection loops)
• Design and optimize custom inference stacks: kernel-level work (CUDA/Triton), quantization (GPTQ/AWQ/FP8), speculative decoding, paged attention, KV-cache engineering
• Lead model serving infrastructure on vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or equivalent at production scale
• Mentor engineers on reinforcement learning, RLHF/DPO, and agent evaluation methodology
• Partner with research and product to translate novel techniques into shippable systems

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years building and shipping production ML systems
• Deep expertise in transformer internals, attention mechanisms, and modern inference optimization
• Demonstrated experience with at least one of: vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, custom CUDA/Triton kernels, distributed training (DeepSpeed/FSDP)
• Production experience with multi-agent frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI) or equivalent custom orchestration
• Strong software engineering fundamentals: Python, type-safe APIs, testing, observability

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD in CS, ML, or related field; or equivalent published research record
• Open-source contributions to inference, agent, or training frameworks
• Experience with MoE architectures, long-context attention variants, or RL for tool use

What AKIVA Offers

• Professional development and skill-building opportunities
• Supportive management team with Veteran-owned company values
• Opportunity to work on impactful client engagements
• Long-term contract engagement with potential for extension
• AI productivity tools and training provided at no cost to employees
• 401(k) with generous company match
• Medical Insurance
• Vision Insurance
• Short-Term & Long-Term Disability Insurance
• Paid Time Off (PTO)
• Profit Sharing

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

AKIVA is committed to providing an environment of mutual respect where equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants and teammates without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical disability, marital status, military and Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We believe that diversity among our teammates is critical to our success as a company, and we seek to recruit, develop, and retain the most talented people within a qualified candidate pool.

AKIVA is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB).