AI Engineer

Spektrum supports apex purchasers (NATO UN EU and National Government and Defence) and their Tier 1 supplier ecosystem with a wide range of specialist services. We provide our clients with professional services specialised aerospace and defence sales delivery and operational subject matter expertise. We are looking for personnel to join our team and support key client projects.

Who we are supporting

The NATO Communication and Information Agency (NCIA) is responsible for providing secure and effective communications and information technology (IT) services to NATOs member countries and its partners. The agency was established in 2012 and is headquartered in Brussels Belgium.

The NCIA provides a wide range of services including:

• Cyber Security: The NCIA provides advanced cybersecurity solutions to protect NATOs communication networks and information systems against cyber threats.
• Command and Control Systems: The NCIA develops and maintains the systems used by NATOs military commanders to plan and execute operations.
• Satellite Communications: The NCIA provides satellite communications services to enable secure and reliable communications between NATO forces.
• Electronic Warfare: The NCIA provides electronic warfare services to support NATOs mission to detect deny and defeat threats to its communication networks.
• Information Management: The NCIA manages NATOs information technology infrastructure including its databases applications and servers.

Overall the NCIA plays a critical role in ensuring the security and effectiveness of NATOs communication and information technology capabilities.

The program

Assistance and Advisory Service (AAS)

The NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency) is NATOs principal C3 capability deliverer and CIS service provider. It provides maintains and defends the NATO enterprise-wide information technology infrastructure to enable Allies to consult together under Article IV and when required stand together in the face of attack under Article V.

To provide these critical services in the modern evolving dynamic environment the NCI Agency needs to build and maintain high performance-engaged workforce. The NCI Agency workforce strategically consists of three major categorises: NATO International Civilians (NIC)s Military (Mil) and Interim Workforce Consultants (IWC)s. The IWCs are a critical part of the overall NCI Agency workforce and make up approximately 15 percent of the total workforce.

Role ID C005309

Role Background

NATO NCIA AI Engineer to design build and maintain AI/ML components and pipelines supporting mission-critical systems. This role sits at the intersection of applied machine learning software engineering and MLOps covering everything from model evaluation and data pipeline development to production-grade LLM/AI agent deployment. The successful candidate will work within secure structured engineering practices to deliver reliable well-documented and maintainable AI solutions.

Role Duties and Responsibilities

• Apply machine learning and data science techniques to new problems and datasets evaluating model outcomes performance and data quality
• Identify issues in ML systems models pipelines and datasets implementing practical improvements
• Design develop test document refactor and maintain moderately complex programs scripts and AI/ML components
• Apply agreed engineering standards tools and secure development practices
• Support AI/software lifecycle engineering including requirements elicitation and automation for development testing release deployment and monitoring
• Define AI modules for integration builds and validate against functional quality security and performance criteria
• Build maintain and improve data pipelines using ETL/ELT processes
• Monitor progress report status and communicate risks or blockers
• Contribute to technology assessments roadmaps and knowledge sharing

Essential Skills Experience and Certifications

• Experience developing optimising deploying and maintaining end-to-end AI/ML pipelines (training packaging monitoring lifecycle management)
• Strong hands-on programming machine learning and applied AI development experience
• Solid understanding of ML concepts model evaluation and performance measurement
• Experience applying pre-trained/foundation models LLMs and Generative AI to practical use cases
• Experience with RAG embeddings vector databases and production-grade AI agent backends (LangChain LlamaIndex Pydantic AI or similar)
• Strong MLOps/AIOps experience: version control CI/CD automation build/release workflows
• Experience developing REST APIs and backend services (FastAPI Pydantic or similar)
• Experience with Docker Kubernetes Helm cloud infrastructure and orchestration tools (Airflow Argo)
• Experience implementing guardrails observability and monitoring for LLM-based systems
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases
• Experience with TypeScript or (nice to have)
• Experience working in secure restricted or air-gapped environments

Working Location

• The Hague Netherlands

Working Policy

• Full-Time On-Site

Travel

• Some travel to other NATO sites may be required

Security Clearance

• Valid National or NATO Secret personal security clearance