AI Engineer

Who We Are

Aptima is a technological leader in the national security industry. Our mission is to drive the future of national security by engineering scalable solutions that fuse technological innovation with human potential to transform how individuals and teams train develop and perform in mission-critical environments.

Our culture is rooted in our core values which have evolved over time and our employees have embraced: Integrity Ingenuity Excellence Respect Engagement Teamwork. At our core Aptima researches develops and innovates within an area that engineering firms largely ignore thehumancomponent. To impact the world in meaningful ways you must bring those innovations to light and that is precisely what we do.

How Youll Make an Impact

Operating in the Dayton area and collaborating closely with DoD research customers you will design develop and apply advanced AI and machine learning models to solve complex mission-critical problems. Whether fine-tuning large language models building computer vision systems or integrating multi-modal AI solutions your work will directly support military readiness and innovation.

You will work hands-on with real-world datasets implement and optimize models in Python using tools such as PyTorch TensorFlow and LangChain and collaborate with fellow AI researchers to deliver high-quality production-ready solutions. By combining technical expertise with creative problem solving you will help drive the next generation of AI capabilities for defense applications.

Key Responsibilities:

• Contribute to the design and development of artificial intelligence (AI) and software systems that classify and measure human states using multimodal sensor approaches
• Contribute to the design development and application of data mining statistical analysis machine learning computational modeling and digital signal processing methods
• Collaborate with software engineers within an agile development environment to implement test and apply mathematical algorithms from research
• Successfully design and implement the scientific and technical aspects of projects and proposals.
• Lead in the execution of technical tasks under projects and proposals resulting in work that is timely and of high quality
• Contribute to the production of Aptima technical reports proposals presentations and published papers
• Support more senior staff through the application of technical knowledge by contributing to proposals participating in capabilities briefs preparing software or meeting materials integrating/installing software meeting with customers etc.
• Continue education in own professional domain (conferences reading). Take initiative to do background reading and/or other forms of professional development related to project needs and technical areas
• Present work at professional conferences and/or in professional publications

• Ability to obtain and maintain a US Government Security Clearance
• Master or PhD preferred
• Minimum of 3-5 years of relevant work experience
• Demonstrated technical and leadership ability to take on this level of requirements
• Possesses general understanding of multiple technical domains relevant to Aptima with a primary focus on a specialty that is integrated with other domains at Aptima
• Ability to competently apply engineering technical skills principles and heuristics to plans and products that are of high quality responsive to customer needs contractually compliant and delivered in a timely manner
• Moderate proficiency in software development practices relevant to ML/AI workflows including object-oriented programming (e.g. Python Java C#) modular code design and transitioning from exploratory notebooks to maintainable production-ready packages. Skills will be assessed during interview process.
• Foundational understanding of machine learning techniques (e.g. deep learning feature extraction and embedding application) and experience building computational models from large datasets. Experience with natural language processing (NLP) large language models (LLMs) agentic workflows or computer vision (CV) is a plus.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion sex sexual orientation gender identity age national origin disability protected veteran status or any other status protected by applicable national federal state or local law.