Senior AI Engineer

Thales Defense & Security Inc. (TDSI)Headquartered in Clarksburg MD is a U.S. company that has been serving domestic and international defense Air Land and Sea domains for 60 years. With over 1000 employees TDSI and its four subsidiaries (Advanced Acoustic Concepts Digital Receiver Technology Tampa Microwave and Trusted Cyber Technologies) supports U.S. Joint Services special operations forces and multi-national partners with a variety of communication visualization signal intelligence/electronic warfare and sensor/sonar capabilities. TDSIs key technologies include tactical handheld radios expeditionary satellite terminals helmet-mounted displays optics and target recognition capability advanced radars undersea sensing and missile dependon what we do!

Top Benefits(Subject to terms of applicable policies/plans)

• Competitive Salary

• Yearly IncentiveCompensation Plan

• Medical insurance for self and eligible family members

• Generous 401(k) program- up to 7% company contribution and 100% immediate vesting

• Tuition Reimbursement

• Paid wellness vacation and holiday leave

• Paid maternity paternity and parental leave

• 9/80 Work Schedule (every other Friday off)

• Hybrid working environment

We are seeking a Senior AI Engineer located in our Clarksburg MD Campus. The Senior AI Engineer will report to the IT DevOps Manager.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture development training and deployment of AI/ML models including traditional ML deep learning computer vision NLP and generative AI.
• Design and manage endtoend MLOps pipelines for data prep training model versioning deployment monitoring and continuous retraining.
• Define and enforce MLOps standards governance and responsible AI best practices across the enterprise.
• Integrate AI solutions into onprem cloud (Azure/AWS) and hybrid environments with strong focus on security and scalability.
• Implement secure and responsible AI controls such as model hardening privacy protections explainability and bias/fairness testing aligned with DoD/NIST frameworks.
• Optimize model and inference performance for GPUs onprem clusters and edge environments.
• Collaborate with security cloud DevOps and application teams to productionize AI systems and resolve complex technical issues.
• Ensure compliant handling of sensitive/classified data according to CMMC NIST DoD and FedRAMP requirements.
• Build Python tooling reusable components and CI/CD integrations to support automation and platform maturity.
• Lead proofsofconcept maintain documentation guide monitoring and incident response and mentor engineering teams.

Qualifications

The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge skill and/or ability required. Reasonableaccommodationsmay be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• U.S. Citizenship required. -Applicants selected may be subject to a government security investigation and must meet eligibility requirements for access to classified information.
• Education: Bachelors degree in Computer Science Data Science AI Engineering Mathematics or related field (or equivalent professional experience). Advanced degree a plus.
• Experience: Minimum 8 years of progressive experience in software engineering DevOps platform engineering data engineering or infrastructure including at least 4 years hands-on AI/ML engineering and MLOps (designing deploying monitoring and operating production AI/ML systems). Strong transferable experience from software DevOps SRE or data platform roles is highly valued given the relative newness of pure AI careers.
• Strong Python skills and experience with major ML frameworks (PyTorch/TensorFlow scikitlearn Hugging Face).
• Handson experience building and maintaining MLOps pipelines (MLflow DVC Kubeflow Airflow Azure ML SageMaker).
• Proficiency deploying AI models using Docker Kubernetes and Helm including GPU workloads.
• Knowledge of AI security adversarial ML explainability and responsible AI principles.
• Experience working with secure data handling and controlled environments.
• Proficiency with Git CI/CD IaC and collaborative development practices.
• Experience with ticketing/ITSM tools (e.g. Jira Service Management).
• Strong analytical troubleshooting and organizational skills.
• Ability to lead mentor and work independently across crossfunctional teams.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for technical and nontechnical audiences.

Preferred but not required

• Advanced degree in CS AI ML or related fields.
• Experience with generative AI LLMs RAG vector databases and LLMOps.
• Experience with onprem GPU clusters HPC environments or schedulers (Slurm Run:ai).
• Model optimization and edge deployment experience (quantization pruning TensorRT ONNX).
• Experience in defense or other highly regulated environments with DoD/NIST/CMMC frameworks.

The annualized pay range for this role is $111476.70 to $142442.45 USD along with a target incentive compensation plan (ICP) of 5% The pay range provided is a good faith estimate representative of the experience level for the role described above. TDSI considers several factors when extending an offer including but not limited to the role function and associated responsibilities a candidates work experience location education/training and key skills.

For specific questions about this job posting candidates may contacttalent acquisitionat

ThalesDefense & Security committed to non-discrimination as applicable under federal state and local laws. We are an E-Verify Employer.

If you needan accommodationor assistancein order toapply for a position with ThalesDefense & Security Inc. please call Human Resourcesat.

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