Senior AI/ML Engineer - LLM Autocoder & Production

Ignite IT, LLC; Suitland, Northern (MD, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k)

401(k) matching

Dental insurance

Flexible spending account

Health insurance

Life insurance

Paid time off

Professional development assistance

Referral program

Tuition reimbursement

Vision insurance

Job summary

Ignite IT Hub seeks a senior AI/ML Engineer to maintain and enhance the U.S. Census Bureau's LLM Autocoder, which assigns codes to survey write-in responses. You will develop and test model and software improvements for ACS, and collaborate with data scientists and MLOps engineers to deploy changes into production.

You will build pilots for additional surveys, adapt to survey taxonomies, and contribute to code reviews and comprehensive technical documentation for government handoff.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, data science, or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in software or ML engineering, including 3+ years building NLP/ML apps and integrating LLMs.
• Strong Python development, data processing, APIs, automated testing, Git, and maintainable design.
• Experience with text classification, prompt design, structured model outputs, and measuring impact on performance.
• Experience deploying or supporting applications in AWS and collaborating with data scientists and ops teams.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain Python components for text preprocessing, model invocation, prompt management, and coding workflows.
• Implement changes to prompts, model config, dictionaries, rules, and supporting code in small increments.
• Build pilots using LLMs, fuzzy matching, and hybrid approaches aligned to survey taxonomies.
• Write unit, integration, regression, negative, and edge-case tests; compare results to approved baselines.
• Reproduce production problems and implement verified corrections across code, data, prompts, and model behavior.
• Collaborate with MLOps on packaging, deployment, rollback, and post-release verification in AWS.
• Participate in code reviews; maintain documentation and reproducible examples for Census handoff.

Skills

Python

APIs

Automated testing

Git

Data processing

NLP

ML applications

LLMs integration

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

AWS

Job description

Ignite IT Hub seeks a senior AI/ML Engineer to maintain and enhance the U.S. Census Bureau's LLM Autocoder, which assigns codes to survey write-in responses. You will develop and test model and software improvements for ACS, and collaborate with data scientists and MLOps engineers to deploy changes into production.

You will build pilots for additional surveys, adapt to survey taxonomies, and contribute to code reviews and comprehensive technical documentation for government handoff.