Artificial Intelligence Research Engineer
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Job Location:
Nashville, IN - USA
Monthly Salary:
Not Disclosed
Posted on:
6 hours ago
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
The Artificial Intelligence Research Engineer is part of the Wicked Problems Laboratory within the Institute of National Security at Vanderbilt University and is a key technical contributor focused on advancing research and development in agentic AI frameworks large-scale data systems and AI-driven analytic tools for national security applications. This position is deeply technical emphasizing the construction testing and optimization of systems that integrate diverse application programming interfaces (APIs) large language models (LLMs) and data pipelines to support adaptive mission-critical workflows.
The role blends AI engineering with applied research execution programming and coordinating agentic AI architectures developing analytic tools and evaluating emerging threats. Strong capability in AI model development secure system design and generative AI analysis is essential particularly in contexts shaped by adversarial pressures and evolving national security challenges.
Reporting to the Head of the Wicked Problems Lab the AI Research Engineer collaborates with research scientists engineers and faculty to assess threat landscapes strengthen cyber resiliency and accelerate the adoption of secure advanced technologies across government industry and public-sector infrastructures.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Support AI research activities including training and tuning small- to medium-sized large language models and coordinating multi-agent AI systems to advance research objectives.
- Conduct AI-driven threat analysis to produce actionable security insights.
- Support the integration evaluation and testing of AI capabilities in laboratory and partner operational environments.
- Develop high-quality documentationincluding system diagrams test results and sponsor deliverablesto support technology maturation and transition.
- Maintain expertise in emerging AI-driven threats adversarial models and advanced AI technologies to shape research direction.
- Collaborate with faculty and interdisciplinary teams to support grant objectives publications prototypes and demonstrations.
- Present technical insights through briefings reports and presentations to academic industry and operational audiences.
Supervisory Relationships: This position does not have supervisory responsibility; this position reports administratively and functionally to the Executive Director of the Institute of National Security.
Qualifications
- Bachelors degree in Computer Science Computer Engineering Data Science or a related technical field is required. Masters degree in related field is preferred.
- 13 years of hands-on AI engineering experience in enterprise research or critical-infrastructure environments is required.
- Direct experience training and tuning foundation models including parameter-efficient techniques (LoRA QLoRA adapters) dataset construction and evaluation across benchmarks is required.
- Practical expertise integrating LLMs with external tools and APIs including retrieval systems vector databases function calling or multi-agent orchestration is required.
- Expert-level Python proficiency including designing and optimizing complex AI research pipelines building high-performance training and inference systems and developing secure production-quality tooling in modern Python ecosystems (PyTorch Hugging Face Ray vLLM) is required.
- Strong software engineering capability including implementing research-grade systems experiment frameworks structured logging and reproducible workflows is required.
- Experience building secure data and model pipelines including preprocessing evaluation and monitoring in sensitive or adversarial environments is required.
- Ability to design and execute end-to-end experiments from rapid prototyping through operational recommendations is required.
- Strong technical communication skills including producing high-quality documentation and sponsor-facing deliverables is required.
- Knowledge of large-scale data systems distributed computing GPU optimization or containerized AI environments (Docker Kubernetes) is preferred.
- Experience building or evaluating agentic AI systemsmulti-agent architectures planning/decision-making agents or autonomous workflows is preferred.
- Eligibility for a U.S. security clearance is strongly preferred.
Required Experience:
IC
Key Skills
- All-Source Intelligence
- Military Intelligence
- GIS
- ICD Coding
- Intelligence Experience
- Military Experience
- Analysis Skills
- Microsoft Powerpoint
- Joint Operations
- Intelligence Analysis
- Leadership Experience
- Writing Skills
About Company
At Vanderbilt University , our work - regardless of title or role - is in service to an important and noble mission in which every member of our community serves in advancing knowledge and transforming lives on a daily basis. Located in Nashville , Tennessee, on a 330+ acre campus and ... View more
