Senior AI Engineer

Overview

Systems Planning and Analysis, Inc. (SPA) delivers high-impact, technical solutions to complex national security issues. With over 50 years of business expertise and consistent growth, we are known for continuous innovation for our government customers, in both the US and abroad. Our exceptionally talented team is highly collaborative in spirit and practice, producing *Results that Matter*. Come work with the best! We offer opportunity, unique challenges, and clear-sighted commitment to the mission. SPA: Objective. Responsive. Trusted.

In this role, you will lead development of systems built on foundation models of all sizes - from small language models (SLMs) suited to edge and cost-constrained deployments, to large language and multimodal models - including custom enterprise copilots, and autonomous agentic workflows. You will ensure these capabilities are deployed securely across local, hybrid, and cloud model backends - spanning Microsoft Azure (including GCC High), Azure Government, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and on-premises/edge infrastructure.

This is a bridge role: your primary depth is in AI engineering and delivery, with strong working fluency in cloud security and DevSecOps practices. You will partner with - not replace - Infrastructure and Security teams to deliver secure, mission-aligned AI at scale in highly regulated environments

Responsibilities: ### AI Engineering & Delivery (primary focus)

• Build and deploy production AI applications using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, and Copilot Studio, accounting for service availability differences between Azure Commercial, Azure Government, and GCC High environments.
• Select and right-size models for mission requirements - balancing capability, cost, latency, and deployment constraints across small, medium, and large foundation models (e.g., SLMs such as Phi, frontier LLMs, embedding and multimodal models).
• Engineer agentic AI systems, including multi‑agen...