AI/ML & LLM Engineer
REI Systems2 years ago
Sterling, VA, USASenior
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, test, implement, evaluate, and optimize machine learning and AI solutions.
- Build reusable Python components, APIs, services, notebooks, AI/ML pipelines, and production-ready AI capabilities.
- Develop generative AI and LLM applications using RAG, prompt engineering, grounding, context management, tool calling, structured outputs, embeddings, semantic search, vector databases, and document-processing pipelines.
- Create intelligent search, summarization, classification, information extraction, question-answering, and workflow-automation capabilities.
- Design ingestion, preprocessing, retrieval, validation, and knowledge pipelines for enterprise documents and data sources.
- Develop and optimize SQL queries and retrieval logic for model training, evaluation, and inference.
- Deploy and maintain model inference APIs, AI services, and microservices across development, test, and production environments.
- Build or support automated model testing, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, retraining, versioning, and experiment-tracking pipelines.
- Monitor model and retrieval quality, latency, cost, drift, failures, and other operational metrics.
- Implement responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, traceability, access controls, safeguards, and auditability.
- Develop RESTful APIs and backend services, participate in code reviews and testing, and integrate AI functionality into enterprise applications.
- Collaborate with data engineers, software developers, product owners, architects, cloud engineers, and business stakeholders.
- Participate in Agile/Scrum delivery activities, technical reviews, documentation, mentoring, and knowledge sharing.
Requirements
- Approximately 5-8 years of professional experience in software development, data engineering, data science, AI/ML, or a related technical field, including substantial hands-on AI/ML development.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field; a master's degree is preferred.
- Strong Python programming skills and experience building production-quality Python applications or services.
- Hands-on experience with machine learning libraries or frameworks such as Scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Hugging Face.
- Experience developing, evaluating, and integrating AI/ML models into applications or production environments.
- Hands-on experience with generative AI, LLMs, NLP, and LLM APIs, including RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, grounding, context management, and LLM evaluation.
- Experience with structured and unstructured data preprocessing, transformation, validation, and analysis.
- Experience developing REST APIs and backend services for AI/ML functionality.
- Working knowledge of SQL and relational databases.
- Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, automated testing, containerization, and modern software development practices.
- Experience working in Agile and multidisciplinary development environments.
- Ability to communicate AI/ML concepts, limitations, risks, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Preferred experience includes FDA, HHS, or federal programs; AWS or Azure AI/ML deployments; Amazon Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, S3, OpenSearch, Azure AI, or Azure OpenAI.
- Preferred experience includes Pinecone, FAISS, pgvector, Chroma, LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, document intelligence, semantic search, enterprise search, LLM evaluation, prompt/version management, guardrails, LLMOps, MLOps, Kubernetes, microservices, event-driven integration, and DevSecOps.
- Must be able to obtain and maintain a clearance.
Benefits
- Hybrid work arrangement at the Sterling, Virginia headquarters with flexibility for remote work under company policy.
- Professional development opportunities and meaningful technology modernization projects.
- Flexibility to spend time with family and friends.
- The role supports FDA initiatives and involves collaboration across multidisciplinary technical teams.
Categories
About REI Systems
REI Systems provides full-lifecycle software engineering, data analytics, and modernization services to U.S. federal, state, and local agencies and nonprofits, including grants and case management solutions and cloud implementations. The privately held, 100% employee-owned firm delivers consulting and systems integration and supports programs at agencies such as the FDA. Founded in 1989 and headquartered in Sterling, Virginia, it focuses on open source, SaaS, and application modernization.