Principal AI/ML Engineer (Large Language Model) (TS/SCI)

About the role

ARKA is seeking a Principal AI/ML Engineer to lead the design and deployment of advanced machine‑learning solutions, including large language models, for defense and commercial space customers. The role combines technical leadership with hands‑on development across multiple AI domains.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a multidisciplinary team of developers and researchers.
• Apply LLMs to remote‑sensing tasks such as collection planning, gap analysis, and pattern‑of‑life detection.
• Fine‑tune foundation models and build adapters (e.g., PEFT, llama‑factory).
• Implement Retrieval‑Augmented Generation pipelines and query vector databases (Weaviate, Pinecone).
• Develop custom applications using LLM frameworks like LangChain and DSPy.
• Deploy LLM solutions on cloud and on‑premise environments with Kubernetes (llama.cpp, vllm, tgi).
• Analyze multi‑modal datasets (images, text, graphs) to extract actionable features.
• Stay current with research literature and translate cutting‑edge concepts into product features.
• Communicate technical status to internal and external leadership.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or a related field.
• 10+ years of professional experience, including software development or data science.
• At least 2 years of hands‑on experience building LLM applications.
• Proven experience leading interdisciplinary research and development teams.

Required skills

• Fine‑tuning foundational models
• Sparse auto‑encoders and representation tuning
• Adapter building (PEFT, llama‑factory)
• Prompt engineering (chain‑of‑thought, tree‑of‑thoughts)
• Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (Weaviate, Pinecone)
• LLM frameworks (LangChain, DSPy)
• AI APIs (AWS Bedrock, OpenAI)
• LLM deployment tools (llama.cpp, vllm, tgi)
• Kubernetes orchestration
• ReAct UI development

What we offer

• Generous relocation assistance for eligible candidates.
• Flexible scheduling options to support work‑life balance.
• Opportunity to work on cutting‑edge AI solutions for national‑security and commercial space missions.