Data Scientist​/AI Engineer

Position Summary

Carrier Team One (CT1) leads transformative data-driven process improvement and knowledge management initiatives for nuclear aircraft carrier maintenance and modernization. This includes maintenance support for all aircraft carrier availabilities, including Refueling Complex Overhaul (RCOH), Planned Incremental Availability (PIA), Selected Restrictive Availability (SRA), Docking Planned Incremental Availability (DPIA), and Carrier Incremental Availability (CIA). The Senior Data Scientist / AI Engineer serves as the principal technical expert and hands‑on builder for CT1's advanced analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities.

This role directly supports the mission to accelerate capability delivery to the fleet, reclaim decades of obsolescence across alterations, and optimize the expenditure of thousands of man‑days and millions of dollars per availability. CT1 particularly values candidates who combine strong technical capability with exceptional learning agility, intellectual curiosity, and drive to rapidly master complex domains and deliver measurable results. This work builds upon CT1's existing Operations Dashboard and Qlik Sense analytics investments that have already demonstrated $9.3M+ savings and 5,200+ man‑day reductions per project.

This is a senior technical individual‑contributor role (non-supervisory) requiring deep expertise in modern LLM engineering, production MLOps, and the ability to translate operational Navy requirements into reliable, secure, and measurable AI solutions. The position demands both exceptional technical craftsmanship and strong stakeholder communication skills to brief results and limitations to project superintendents, engineers, senior leadership, and external stakeholders (NAVSEA, PEO, TYCOM).

The primary focus of this position is the design, development, deployment, and continuous improvement of production‑grade Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, agentic AI workflows, and LLM-powered analytics tailored to carrier hotwashes (after‑action reviews), project performance data, technical documentation, and operational decision support. The incumbent will leverage and extend platforms including ADVANA, Databricks, AWS Sage Maker, Lang Chain/Lang Graph, and cURL to turn complex, unstructured, and structured naval maintenance data into actionable insights, automated summaries, predictive signals, and natural‑language query capabilities.

35% — LLM/RAG Pipeline Architecture, Development & Productionization

Lead the end-to-end design and implementation of scalable, secure RAG and multi-agent systems. Select and optimize embedding models, chunking strategies, hybrid retrieval (vector + keyword + metadata), reranking, and context compression techniques specifically tuned for technical naval maintenance documentation, alteration history, hotwash narratives, and project artifacts. Implement hallucination detection, citation/grounding mechanisms, and domain-adapted evaluation metrics. Deploy and iterate on Lang Chain/Lang Graph (or equivalent) orchestration layers integrated with approved LLM endpoints (Gemini primary;

others as authorized). Ensure solutions meet performance, cost, latency, and reliability targets for operational use.

Architect and maintain robust data pipelines that ingest, clean, enrich, version, and serve data from heterogeneous shipyard sources (ADVANA datasets, MAXIMO or equivalent EAM systems, Qlik extracts, project schedules, technical manuals, and unstructured logs). Implement vector stores, metadata filtering, and feature stores on Databricks or Sage Maker. Establish data quality monitoring, lineage, and governance aligned with DoD and Navy data standards.

Enable both batch and near-real-time capabilities as required for hotwash cycles and availability execution.

15% — AI‑Augmented Operational Analytics & Decision Support

Partner with CT1 analysts, Work Integration Managers, Assistant Project Superintendents, and Process Masters to identify high-impact AI use cases. Build and product ionize AI‑enhanced features for the CT1 Operations Dashboard and related…