Senior AI/ML Engineer: Lead End-to-End ML for Defense

SRC; Fairborn (OH); In loco; USD 93.000 - 116.000; Tempo pieno

Vantaggi offerti da questo lavoro

Paid time off

Retirement contribution

Tuition support

Descrizione del lavoro

SRC, Inc. seeks a Senior AI/ML Engineer to lead machine learning and generative AI efforts for ISR, EW, advanced sensing, and decision science missions. You will own problems, not tickets, and guide data strategies, model development, and deployment toward program transitions.

Strong Python/PyTorch and LLM toolchain experience required. Dayton, OH area compensation ranges with emphasis on field-ready, rigor-driven ML systems, collaboration with engineers, and customer-facing technical material.

Competenze

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, Statistics, or a related technical discipline, plus 4+ years of relevant experience; or a Master's degree plus 2+ years.
• Demonstrated record of taking ML systems from concept to working capability, not just prototype notebooks.
• Strong proficiency in Python and deep expertise in PyTorch (or equivalent), including custom training loops, datasets/dataloaders, mixed precision, and profiling.
• Practical experience with the modern LLM toolchain: Hugging Face Transformers, PEFT, TRL or equivalent, and serving/inference frameworks such as vLLM, TGI, or Ollama.
• Substantive experience with at least one of: generative AI and LLM fine-tuning, deep learning for perception or signal domains, or reinforcement learning.
• Rigorous approach to evaluation and the statistical literacy to back it up - confidence intervals, significance, and the difference between a real improvement and noise.
• Experience mentoring or technically leading other engineers.
• Ability to explain technical work and its limitations to program managers, customers, and executives.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.

Mansioni

• Lead the technical approach for AI/ML tasks of moderate scope, from problem formulation and data strategy through model development, evaluation, and transition
• Design dataset strategies for domains where labeled data is scarce or expensive, including synthetic data generation, simulation-to-real transfer, active learning, and weak supervision
• Own model development end to end: architecture and method selection, training, fine-tuning, distributed training where warranted, hyperparameter strategy, and error analysis
• Build evaluation methodology using task-grounded metrics, statistically sound comparisons, ablations, adversarial and out-of-distribution test sets, and honest characterization of failure modes
• Lead generative AI efforts including model selection across open-weight and commercial options, supervised and preference-based fine-tuning (SFT, DPO, GRPO), RAG architecture, agentic and tool-using systems, and guardrail design
• Apply reinforcement learning where it fits the problem, and be able to articulate when it doesn't
• Ddrive model efficiency and deployment readiness: quantization, distillation, pruning, export and runtime optimization, and the compute/latency/accuracy tradeoffs that govern fieldable systems
• Establish and enforce reproducibility practices through experiment tracking, data and model versioning, containerized environments, and CI for ML code
• Guide the technical and research efforts of less experienced engineers; review their work, develop their judgment, and raise the technical rigor of the team
• Contribute to proposals, white papers, and internal R&D pitches, and assist in presenting findings and recommendations to customers
• Partner with algorithm engineers, software engineers, and program staff to migrate models from research code into real-time and embedded applications
• Identify technical risks early and propose alternative approaches before a program discovers them

Conoscenze

Python

PyTorch

ML systems development

Model evaluation

Reinforcement learning

Generative AI

Leadership

Communication

Experiment tracking

Formazione

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/Math/Physics/Statistics

Master's degree in a related field

Strumenti

Hugging Face Transformers

PEFT

TRL

vLLM

TGI

Ollama

DeepSpeed

Ray

Descrizione del lavoro

SRC, Inc. seeks a Senior AI/ML Engineer to lead machine learning and generative AI efforts for ISR, EW, advanced sensing, and decision science missions. You will own problems, not tickets, and guide data strategies, model development, and deployment toward program transitions.

Strong Python/PyTorch and LLM toolchain experience required. Dayton, OH area compensation ranges with emphasis on field-ready, rigor-driven ML systems, collaboration with engineers, and customer-facing technical material.