Senior MLOps Engineer

Ignite IT, LLC; Suitland, Northern (MD, KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; 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 is seeking a senior MLOps Engineer to support reliable operation and controlled improvement of the U.S. Census Bureau's AWS-based LLM Autocoder. You will maintain software and data pipelines, automate testing and releases, and help resolve production issues.

Working with AI/ML engineers and evaluators, you will make approved changes reproducible, observable, and recoverable across the American Community Survey (ACS) and related applications.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years in DevOps/cloud/software/data engineering; 3+ years ML systems.
• Strong AWS and Linux with Python/shell scripting; knowledge of IAM/storage/monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines and data workflows with government-approved tools.
• Version and trace code, models, prompts, configurations, data dependencies, and eval artifacts.
• Automate build, test, packaging, and deployment steps; attach validation evidence.
• Monitor health, latency, throughput, and resource use; tie ML monitoring to metrics.
• Diagnose production incidents and document root causes; verify recovery.
• Prepare release and rollback procedures; ensure compliant changes.
• Apply access control and sensitive-data handling; maintain runbooks and configs.

Skills

AWS

Linux

Python

Shell scripting

Git

CI/CD

ML experiment tracking

Production troubleshooting

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

Monitoring tools

Job description

Ignite IT Hub is seeking a senior MLOps Engineer to support reliable operation and controlled improvement of the U.S. Census Bureau's AWS-based LLM Autocoder. You will maintain software and data pipelines, automate testing and releases, and help resolve production issues. Working with AI/ML engineers and evaluators, you will make approved changes reproducible, observable, and recoverable across the American Community Survey (ACS) and related applications.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and improve software and data pipelines and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) workflows using Government-approved tools.
• Version and trace code, model identifiers, prompts, configurations, data dependencies, and evaluation artifacts so results and releases can be reproduced.
• Automate build, test, packaging, and deployment steps; integrate required validation evidence and approval checkpoints into release workflows.
• Monitor processing health, failures, latency, throughput, and resource use; connect model-performance monitoring with metrics defined by the data science and evaluation team.
• Diagnose production incidents and pipeline failures, document workarounds and root causes, and verify recovery with the AI/ML Engineer and Government staff.
• Prepare release and rollback procedures, integrate Government-approved changes, and verify system behavior after deployment.
• Apply access, secrets, logging, and sensitive-data handling controls; maintain runbooks, configuration records, and operational knowledge for cross-training and transition

Required qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, information technology, or a related field, or equivalent relevant professional experience.
• 8+ years in DevOps, cloud, software, or data engineering, including 3+ years operating ML systems or automated data-processing platforms.
• Strong AWS and Linux experience, with Python or shell scripting and practical knowledge of cloud identity, access controls, storage, and monitoring.
• Experience with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, environment configuration, dependency management, and reliable deployment and rollback practices.
• Experience with ML artifact versioning or experiment tracking, production troubleshooting, and clear operational documentation; ability to coordinate across engineering and Government teams.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience operating LLM inference workflows, batch classification pipelines, or federal systems handling sensitive information.
• Experience with infrastructure as code, containers, and managed AWS AI/ML services; relevant AWS certification.

Conditions of employment

Position contingent on contract award. Must be able to obtain and maintain applicable Census Special Sworn Status and Personal Identity Verification (PIV) credentials, follow confidentiality requirements, and support Census core business hours and coordinated critical processing runs.

Benefits

• 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