AI Engineer SME

Be Challenged and Make a Difference
In a world of technology, people make the difference. We believe if we invest in great people, then great things will happen. At Ana Vation, we provide unmatched value to our customers and employees through innovative solutions and an engaging culture.

Ana Vation is seeking a highly skilled AI Engineer to join our high-performing team and lead the research, design, development, and execution of specialized operational and analytic cyber capabilities in support of real-world missions.

• Build scalable, production-ready AI/ML/GenAI models, pipelines, and microservices.
• Develop training, evaluation, and inference pipelines in Python using PyTorch, Tensor Flow, or scikit learn.
• Deploy and manage models with MLOps, CI/CD, containerization, and monitoring frameworks.
• Implement vector databases, embeddings, LLM applications, agentic AI, and tool calling workflows.
• Optimize models for accuracy, latency, cost, and scalability across distributed environments.
• Ensure AI governance, documentation, ethical compliance, and secure posture alignment.
• Provide technical mentorship and drive cross-team engineering standardization.

This position requires an active Top Secret (TS) clearance and the ability to obtain SCI access with a CI polygraph. This position is on-site in Chantilly, VA.

• Active Top Secret (TS) clearance with eligibility for Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) and ability to obtain a Counterintelligence (CI) Polygraph.
• Bachelor's degree or master's degree with 10 years of experience specializing in AI/ML engineering
• Hands‑on experience deploying production AI/GenAI and LLM systems, including embeddings, multi‑model and multimodal orchestration, reasoning, memory, and tool execution.
• Proficiency with PyTorch, Tensor Flow, scikit‑learn, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP), with practical MLOps experience using MLflow, Azure ML, or Vertex AI.
• Experience implementing NLP, computer vision, reinforcement learning, temporal, spatial, geographic, or quantitative AI capabilities, including named entity recognition, contextual entity extraction, and entity resolution.
• Experience developing multi‑step retrieval and structured output workflows with source citations, provenance, and traceable analytic results.
• Expertise in data architecture integrating vector, graph, and relational databases, including automated ETL pipeline development, scheduling, optimization, complex parsing, and schema‑aligned ingestion and normalization of structured and unstructured data.
• Experience implementing data‑layer Attribute‑Based Access Control (ABAC) and end‑to‑end data lineage tracking.
• Experience supporting air‑gapped, hybrid, and on‑premises environments, including locally hosted GPU servers, hyperconverged infrastructure, container orchestration, distributed systems, and multitenant Cross‑Domain Solutions (CDS).
• Proficiency in full‑stack application development and integration using Type Script, React, Python, FastAPI, LanceDB, Lance Graph, PostgreSQL, Temporal.io, Docker, and Kubernetes to connect user interfaces, backend services, middleware, retrieval systems, databases, and AI/GenAI services.
• Experience delivering and maintaining solutions in agile engineering environments.
• Requires an active Top Secret (TS) clearance and the ability to obtain SCI access with a CI polygraph.
• Requires the ability to work on‑site in Chantilly, VA.

• Experience in federal, defense, or highly regulated environments.
• Knowledge of ethical AI, governance frameworks, and secure development practices.
• Skills in large‑scale optimization, GPU acceleration, or distributed training.
• Experience building APIs,…