Senior AI/ML Engineer — Platform & Systems Lead

Raft Company Website; Honolulu (HI); Remote; USD 180,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully covered healthcare

Fully covered dental

Fully covered vision

401(k) with company match

PTO + 11 paid holidays

Job summary

Raft Company Website seeks a Lead AI/ML Engineer for the [R]AIMS platform. You will shape architecture, lead major epics, and drive engineering quality across distributed data systems and Kubernetes-native infrastructure.

You will mentor teams and collaborate with product and delivery groups to meet mission-driven requirements. You will work hands-on in the codebase, coordinating model integration, deployment, and performance tuning while engaging with Department of Defense stakeholders to

Qualifications

• 6+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping production software systems across the full stack (frontend, backend, infrastructure, and ML).
• Deep software engineering fundamentals; ability to design, build, and evolve complex, scalable systems.
• Exceptional technical communication; ability to influence across teams without direct authority.
• Experience designing distributed systems with service decomposition, observability, and fault tolerance.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform architecture in production.
• Experience building data-intensive or AI-enabled production systems with real users and performance constraints.
• Demonstrated technical leadership over large cross-functional engineering initiatives.
• Strong system design and architecture decision-making under incomplete information.
• Some exposure to training, fine-tuning, or deploying ML models in production contexts.
• Ability to obtain Security+ within first 90 days; US citizenship and TS/SCI eligibility.

Responsibilities

• Drive architectural decisions across the [R]AIMS platform, balancing performance, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Lead major technical epics from conception through delivery with cross-functional teams.
• Simplify distributed architecture to scale while maintaining capability and reliability.
• Optimize platform performance across edge and cloud deployment targets.
• Establish reusable engineering patterns to improve developer productivity and code quality.
• Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and elevate technical execution across the platform.
• Partner with AI/ML engineers on model integration, inference optimization, and deployment.
• Engage with customers and DoD stakeholders, representing Raft’s technical capabilities.

Skills

Leadership

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud-native

AI/ML platforms

Technical communication

Tools

Kafka

RMF

Job description

Raft Company Website seeks a Lead AI/ML Engineer for the [R]AIMS platform. You will shape architecture, lead major epics, and drive engineering quality across distributed data systems and Kubernetes-native infrastructure.

You will mentor teams and collaborate with product and delivery groups to meet mission-driven requirements. You will work hands-on in the codebase, coordinating model integration, deployment, and performance tuning while engaging with Department of Defense stakeholders to