Distinguished AI/ML Engineer

Overview

FTI Defense delivers mission-focused solutions to the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community through advanced engineering, digital transformation, and program execution expertise. We help our customers solve complex challenges and achieve mission success by integrating people, process, and technology.

FTI Defense is seeking a Distinguished AI/ML Engineer to serve as a technical leader, architect, and integrator — designing, building, deploying, and sustaining AI systems that transform complex mission data into trusted, explainable insights.

This is a hands-on builder role, not an analytics management position. The ideal candidate is equally comfortable writing model code, standing up ML pipelines, and integrating AI inference services into operational systems within secure environments. The right candidate blends deep AI/ML engineering expertise with system-level architecture leadership and an ability to unify data engineering, simulation modeling, and responsible AI principles into scalable, mission-ready capabilities. Responsibilities: * Architect and integrate hybrid AI systems that combine traditional machine learning, deep learning, large language models (LLMs), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines. * Design and deploy scalable AI architectures including APIs, microservices, and model-serving frameworks that integrate seamlessly with analytic, simulation, or operational systems. * Lead the full AI/ML lifecycle — from data ingestion and feature engineering through training, deployment, and sustainment within secure DoD environments (IL5/IL6, ATO, GovCloud). * Engineer event-driven data pipelines and feature stores for both structured and unstructured data, including text, imagery, and simulation outputs. * Ensure Responsible AI practices by embedding traceability, explainability, and confidence scoring into deployed systems. * Implement and maintain MLOps pipelines (MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow, Docker/Kubernetes) to...