Senior AI Lead
Logistics Management Institute2 days ago
Tysons, VA, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$145k - $220k/yr
Responsibilities
- Lead AI-enabled solution delivery from problem framing and feasibility through prototyping, evaluation, deployment readiness, and iterative improvement.
- Translate VA mission and workflow needs into AI solution approaches, technical requirements, evaluation criteria, and delivery roadmaps.
- Lead technical design decisions for generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic AI, intelligent automation, and AI-assisted decision support.
- Select models, AI services, orchestration frameworks, retrieval approaches, prompt patterns, agent tools, APIs, and cloud services based on mission fit, risk, performance, cost, and maintainability.
- Define evaluation approaches covering task success, groundedness, relevance, hallucination risk, latency, cost, safety, human review, and release criteria.
- Assess authoritative data sources, retrieval quality, data readiness, lineage, access constraints, sensitivity, and fitness for AI-enabled use.
- Coordinate execution across software, data, platform/DevSecOps, integration, QA, HCD/product, cybersecurity/privacy, and other disciplines.
- Establish human-in-the-loop, feedback, guardrail, fallback, escalation, monitoring, observability, and operational support patterns.
- Review AI prototypes and implementations, identify engineering and design risks, and drive remediation before pilot, release, or scale decisions.
- Advise on model choice, caching, routing, token use, infrastructure, and reuse to improve AI solution economics.
- Communicate technical findings and tradeoffs to VA stakeholders and LMI leadership, mentor technical staff, and establish reusable AI engineering and evaluation practices.
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, information systems, engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent professional experience; an advanced degree is valued.
- 10+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, solution architecture, cloud engineering, data/AI systems, technical delivery, or related disciplines, including complex enterprise solutions.
- 3+ years of recent hands-on or technical-lead experience delivering AI/ML, generative AI, LLM, agentic AI, or AI-enabled automation solutions beyond isolated proofs of concept.
- Experience translating ambiguous mission or business needs into AI approaches, architectures, evaluation plans, implementation priorities, and measurable outcomes.
- Strong knowledge of prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings/vector retrieval, tool and function calling, agents/orchestration, model selection, context management, and evaluation.
- Hands-on technical fluency with Python, APIs, JSON, SQL/data access, cloud services, source/version control, and modern engineering practices sufficient to review code and troubleshoot integrations.
- Experience delivering AI solutions in Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or comparable enterprise environments with data services, identity/access controls, APIs, logging, monitoring, and deployment pipelines.
- Experience establishing AI evaluation and quality practices using test datasets, groundedness/relevance checks, failure-mode analysis, human review, observability, regression testing, and release criteria.
- Understanding of responsible AI considerations including privacy, security, sensitive data, transparency, human oversight, bias, misuse, model limitations, and risk-based controls.
- Ability to lead multidisciplinary technical teams, resolve competing technical perspectives, mentor practitioners, and communicate complex AI concepts to senior non-technical stakeholders.
- Recommended certifications include Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Solutions Architect Expert, AWS AI/ML or Solutions Architect credentials, Google Professional Machine Learning Engineer, or comparable cloud/AI certification.
- Ability to complete and maintain required federal background investigation, suitability, and Public Trust requirements and comply with VA security, privacy, training, records, and data-handling requirements.
- Desired qualifications include 12+ years of enterprise technology experience, 5+ years leading AI/ML or intelligent automation delivery, regulated-enterprise experience, production or pilot GenAI/agentic AI delivery, and experience with AI observability, lifecycle management, evaluation harnesses, red teaming, guardrails, and reusable AI standards.
Benefits
- Full-time role located in Tysons, Virginia, supporting Department of Veterans Affairs modernization initiatives.
Categories
About Logistics Management Institute
Logistics Management Institute (LMI) provides consulting, software development, and analytics services to U.S. federal agencies, with strengths in supply chain, digital engineering, AI, and modeling and simulation. It builds and sustains government systems—such as Army acquisition and contract-writing platforms—while delivering data-driven modernization and program support across defense, space, healthcare, and energy. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Tysons, Virginia, LMI operates as a privately held contractor to the public sector.