AI Research Engineer

What We're Doing

At Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems, we're on a mission to drive innovation and uphold the highest standards of business ethics. We believe that by pushing the boundaries of visionary thinking, we can achieve exceptional results. As a Lockheed Martin employee, you'll have the opportunity to make a meaningful impact while working in an environment that values integrity and excellence.

The Assembly & Flight Operations (AFO) Digital Transformation team is at the forefront of integrating artificial intelligence and machine learning into defense systems. In this role you will collaborate with a multidisciplinary team to design, develop, and deploy AI driven applications—from data set creation and deep learning model training to embedding automation technologies and hardware interfaces. You will be involved in every phase of the system development lifecycle, including requirements generation, system and software design, implementation, integration & test, and verification & validation.

Activities span low TRL research, prototype development, demo construction, and transition to production, with a focus on computer vision solutions (anomaly detection, object detection, segmentation) and large language model implementations (RAG, agentic frameworks).

As a key member of our AI / Machine Learning team, you will:

• Assist in designing and building innovative software applications with intuitive user experiences, primarily using Python and occasionally C/C++ for hardware interfacing or performance optimization.
• Utilize deep learning models for a variety of AI/ML use cases.
• Create and curate high quality datasets to support model development and evaluation.
• Integrate AI functionality into cohesive systems that incorporate automation technologies and embedded devices.
• Leverage Git, Bash scripting, multithreading, and GPU acceleration to ensure efficient, scalable solutions.
• Staying current with emerging AI/ML algorithms, analytics, and domain specific technologies, and applying them to solve complex problems.
• Contribute both research & development initiatives and the practical deployment of AI software through the AI Software Factory.

This position will require the selected candidate to have or obtain an Interim Secret level U.S. government security clearance before starting with Lockheed Martin. U.S. citizenship is a requirement for consideration.

This role offers a unique blend of cutting edge research, rapid prototyping, and end to end product delivery within a mission critical defense environment.

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering
• 2 years of experience utilizing Python for development and machine learning (e.g. Tensor Flow, PyTorch, Lang Chain)
• Proficiency in Python and foundational machine learning concepts, with the ability to independently develop, train, and evaluate models
• Experience with AI/ML concepts and applications (ex: Transformers, Computer Vision, LLMs, RAG)
• Dev Ops experience including CI/CD pipelines to build, test, deploy applications
• Experience with Git
• Experience with software planning and execution throughout the requirements, development, design, build, test, and integration phases of a program & familiarity with transitioning prototype software to production, including rapid software prototyping experience to create minimal viable products for evaluation of options

• Proficiency with C, C++, MATLAB, BASH
• Experience interfacing with databases (SQL, Mongo
  
  DB)
• General web development experience (HTML, CSS)
• Experience with different JavaScript libraries
• Experience developing applications on Linux
• Experience developing containerized applications
• Experience with network/messaging (UDP, ZeroMQ, RESTful API, OPCUA)
• Experience with multithreading and GPU acceleration

Clearance Level: None

Expression of Interest: By applying to this job, you are expressing interest in this position and could be considered for other career opportunities where similar skills and requirements have been identified as a match. Should this match be identified you may be contacted for this and future openings.

Ability to Work…