Principal AI​/ML Engineer

Company Overview

Pantheon Data (a Kenific Holding company) is a private, small business based in the Washington, DC, area. Pantheon Data was founded in 2011, initially providing acquisition and supply chain management services to the US Coast Guard. Our service offerings have grown in the past ten years, including infrastructure resiliency, contact center operations, information technology, software engineering, program management, strategic communications, engineering, and cybersecurity.

We have also grown our customer base to include commercial clients. The company has used this experience to expand our service offerings to other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Defense (DoD), and other Federal Civilian Agencies.

We are seeking a Principal AI/ML Engineer to serve as a technical leader and architect for advanced Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) and Generative AI solutions. This role goes beyond hands-on model development and focuses on setting technical vision, establishing best practices, and leading the design of scalable, production-grade AI systems. The ideal candidate is a recognized expert in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and deep learning, with proven experience integrating these capabilities into end-to-end enterprise solutions that process and extract value from large volumes of unstructured data.

As a Principal Engineer
, you will drive innovation, guide architecture decisions, mentor engineering teams, and work closely with product, leadership, and customers to translate complex business challenges into robust AI/ML solutions.

• Technical Leadership & Strategy
• Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for AI/ML and IDP capabilities across products and programs.
• Establish architectural standards, design patterns, and best practices for scalable, secure, and maintainable AI systems.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, research advancements, and tooling in Generative AI, LLMs, OCR, and NLP, and recommend adoption where appropriate.
• Serve as the senior technical authority for AI/ML design decisions and solution trade-offs.

• Solution Architecture & Development
• Architect end-to-end Intelligent Document Processing solutions combining OCR, NLP, LLMs, and other deep learning models.
• Design and oversee implementation of production-grade ML systems, including data pipelines, model training workflows, evaluation frameworks, and inference services.
• Lead the development of reusable AI/ML frameworks, services, and accelerators that can be leveraged across multiple projects.
• Ensure solutions meet requirements for performance, scalability, reliability, and security.

• Generative AI & Advanced Modeling
• Guide the use of LLMs and other generative models for document understanding, information extraction, summarization, classification, and question answering.
• Define best practices for prompt engineering, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and model evaluation.
• Oversee experimentation and model benchmarking to continuously improve solution accuracy and efficiency.

• Data & MLOps Integration
• Collaborate with data engineering teams to design robust data ingestion, labeling, and feature engineering pipelines.
• Define and implement MLOps best practices, including versioning, model governance, monitoring, and automated deployment.
• Ensure responsible AI practices, including model explainability, bias mitigation, and auditability where applicable.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with product managers, customers, and business stakeholders to translate high-level requirements into technical AI/ML solution designs.
• Communicate complex AI/ML concepts clearly to non-technical audiences, including executives and clients.
• Work closely with engineering leaders to align AI/ML initiatives with overall platform architecture.

• Mentorship & Team Development
• Mentor and guide senior and junior engineers, fostering technical growth and engineering excellence.
• Lead technical design reviews, code reviews, and architecture discussions.
• Promote a culture of innovation, knowledge…