Senior LLMOps Engineer

Steampunk; McLean (VA); On-site; USD 145,000 - 185,000; Full time

Job summary

Steampunk is seeking a Senior LLMOps Engineer in McLean, VA to design, implement, and maintain production-grade LLM pipelines and GenAI infrastructure. You will lead RAG systems, model hosting, and retrieval workflows across cloud environments while ensuring governance and cost efficiency.

You will build automated evaluation, CI/CD for AI workloads, and collaborate with data scientists to productionize prototypes into enterprise-grade solutions. Strong Python and cloud experience are required.

Qualifications

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance.
• Bachelor’s degree with 10+ years of total experience.
• 5+ years in software/data/ML ops with 2+ years in LLM/GenAI operations.
• Hands-on experience with RAG pipelines and retrieval systems.
• Fluent Python programming skills.
• Experience deploying models with Transformers and specialized runtimes.
• Proficient in FastAPI, PyTorch, LangChain and vector databases.
• Cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and model hosting experience.
• CI/CD for AI workloads and infrastructure-as-code expertise.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable LLM and RAG pipelines.
• Design secure GenAI infrastructure across clouds for reliability and cost efficiency.
• Create automated evaluation systems for safety, latency and governance.
• Develop CI/CD workflows for datasets, model lineage, and testing.
• Collaborate with AI Product Engineers to productionize prototypes.
• Integrate vector DBs, model gateways, guards, and retrieval systems.
• Implement observability to track performance, hallucinations, and costs.
• Lead troubleshooting for deployment, inference, and pipeline issues.
• Mentor engineers and contribute to reusable tooling.

Skills

Python

Hugging Face Transformers

vLLM

TensorRT-LLM

LangChain

LlamaIndex

FastAPI

PyTorch

Agile methodologies

Prompt engineering

Education

Bachelor’s degree

10+ years of total experience

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

FAISS

Milvus

Pinecone

Git

Job description

Overview

We are looking for an experienced Senior LLMOps Engineer to design, implement, and maintain production-grade large language model (LLM) pipelines, deployment architectures, and monitoring systems across enterprise environments. The Senior LLMOps Engineer will play a critical role in operationalizing generative AI capabilities, ensuring that LLM-based applications are scalable, secure, reliable, and compliant with emerging AI risk and governance frameworks. This role spans model deployment, orchestration, evaluation, optimization, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.

Contributions

• Architect, build, and maintain scalable LLM and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines, including model hosting, inference optimization, retrieval layers, and context management frameworks.

• Lead the design and implementation of secure GenAI infrastructure across cloud environments, ensuring reliability, performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.

• Build and manage automated evaluation systems that assess LLM output quality, safety, latency, and adherence to AI governance requirements.

• Develop CI/CD workflows tailored for LLM- and GenAI-based applications, including dataset versioning, model lineage, and automated testing of prompt and model behaviors.

• Collaborate with AI Product Engineers and Data Scientists to productionize LLM-based prototypes into enterprise-grade, maintainable systems.

• Integrate vector databases, model gateways, content filters, and guardrail frameworks into end-to-end LLM and RAG solutions.

• Implement observability and monitoring solutions that track performance metrics, hallucination rates, cost profiles, and user interaction patterns.

• Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for issues related to LLM deployment, inference performance, retrieval pipelines, or overall pipeline reliability.

• Develop and maintain Python-based services, integrations, and automation supporting LLM and RAG pipelines.

• Stay current with emerging LLM architectures, inference optimizations, fine-tuning techniques, and relevant MLSecOps patterns.

• Ensure compliance with data privacy, ethical AI, security, and AI governance frameworks throughout pipeline design and operations.

• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to AI engineering best practices, tooling, and reusable infrastructure patterns.

• You will contribute to the growth of our AI & Data Exploitation Practice!

Qualifications

• Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance.

• Bachelor’s degree and 10+ years of total experience.

• 5+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, MLOps, or cloud engineering, with 2+ years focused specifically on LLM or GenAI operations.

• Hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines.

• Fluency in Python.

• Strong experience deploying models using frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers, vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, or similar.

• Experience with operational tooling and frameworks such as FastAPI, PyTorch, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and vector databases such as FAISS, Milvus, Pinecone, or similar.

• Advanced knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including model hosting, distributed compute, and secure networking patterns.

• Hands-on experience building CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and environment provisioning for AI/ML workloads.

• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation.

• Familiarity with MLSecOps, AI governance, model hardening, prompt injection defenses, and content safety monitoring.

• Strong understanding of logging, observability, and performance profiling for high-throughput LLM inference systems.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain trade-offs and architectural decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Demonstrated ability to balance long-term platform thinking with hands-on operations and rapid problem solving.

• Experience working in Agile development environments and using modern project management tools.

About steampunk

Steampunk relies on several factors to determine salary, including but not limited to geographic location, contractual requirements, education, knowledge, skills, competencies, and experience. The projected compensation range for this position is $145,000 to $185,000. The estimate displayed represents a typical annual salary range for this position. Annual salary is just one aspect of Steampunk’s total compensation package for employees. Learn more about additional Steampunk benefits here.

Identity Statement

As part of the application process, you are expected to be on camera during interviews and assessments. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud.

Steampunk is a Change Agent in the Federal contracting industry, bringing new thinking to clients in the Homeland, Federal Civilian, Health and DoD sectors. Through our Human-Centered delivery methodology, we are fundamentally changing the expectations our Federal clients have for true shared accountability in solving their toughest mission challenges.If you want to learn more about our story, visit http://www.steampunk.com.

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.Steampunk participates in the E-Verify program.