AI Developer/Engineer

Upslope Advisors is an 8(a) certified business consulting and professional services firm dedicated to delivering high-impact solutions to federal clients. They are seeking an AI Developer/Engineer to design, build, evaluate, deploy, and sustain production AI and machine-learning solutions for a federal civilian agency.

Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, train, evaluate, and optimize artificial intelligence and machine-learning models
• Build production retrieval-augmented generation applications, advanced chatbots, document-processing services, predictive models, and automation tools
• Select appropriate models, algorithms, embeddings, vector stores, and retrieval strategies
• Develop model-performance metrics and document experiments, assumptions, limitations, and results
• Support the development of fraud-detection, forecasting, public-sector analytics, and other mission-focused AI capabilities
• Evaluate model accuracy, groundedness, hallucination risk, bias, drift, reliability, security, and overall performance
• Implement model guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls, logging, and operational monitoring
• Conduct prompt testing, retrieval-quality testing, hallucination testing, and performance validation
• Identify model limitations and recommend appropriate technical or operational controls
• Support continuous evaluation and improvement of deployed AI solutions
• Develop Python-based artificial intelligence, data-processing, and API services
• Perform data preprocessing, feature engineering, statistical analysis, and data-quality validation
• Work with large and complex datasets from multiple structured and unstructured sources
• Integrate AI and machine-learning models into full-stack applications and enterprise technology platforms
• Support front-end, middleware, database, API, and back-end integration
• Refactor and onboard externally developed AI applications into controlled enterprise environments
• Develop infrastructure as code using Terraform or comparable tools
• Build and maintain Git-based continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines
• Implement automated testing, deployment controls, and release-management processes
• Integrate observability, alerting, performance monitoring, and model-monitoring capabilities
• Support the deployment and operation of AI applications in secure cloud and enterprise environments
• Troubleshoot application, model, data, integration, and production-performance issues
• Prepare architecture, build, operating, security, model, and user documentation
• Document models, experiments, processes, technical decisions, assumptions, and limitations
• Collaborate with product owners, data scientists, software engineers, cloud engineers, security teams, and customer stakeholders
• Support demonstrations, technical reviews, knowledge transfer, and user adoption activities
• Support accessibility, security authorization, data-governance, and continuous-monitoring activities

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, or a related field
• Five to ten years of relevant software-development, data-science, or AI and machine-learning engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Python
• Demonstrated experience designing and deploying machine-learning solutions
• Experience integrating AI and machine-learning models into production applications
• Strong understanding of model evaluation, optimization, testing, and performance measurement
• Experience working with large and complex datasets
• Experience with data preprocessing, feature engineering, statistical analysis, and data-quality validation
• Experience with Git, continuous integration and continuous delivery, automated testing, and infrastructure as code
• Experience integrating monitoring or observability tools into AI systems
• Familiarity with deep-learning frameworks and modern AI and machine-learning tools
• Ability to document models, experiments, processes, and technical decisions
• Strong analytical, troubleshooting, communication, and collaboration skills
• U.S. citizenship is required
• The selected candidate must be able to obtain and maintain a federal public trust determination
• Production experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Azure Machine Learning, AWS SageMaker, GCP Vertex AI, or comparable platforms
• Experience developing retrieval-augmented generation applications, vector-search solutions, and advanced chatbots
• Experience with embeddings, vector databases, retrieval strategies, and document-ingestion pipelines
• Experience with prompt engineering, large language model evaluation, guardrails, drift monitoring, and hallucination testing
• Experience with ServiceNow AI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, or comparable enterprise AI tools
• Experience supporting federal cloud environments and FedRAMP requirements
• Knowledge of National Institute of Standards and Technology controls and federal security-authorization processes
• Experience working with Controlled Unclassified Information or personally identifiable information
• Experience developing accessible applications that meet Section 508 requirements
• Experience supporting disaster-response, grants, fraud-detection, forecasting, or public-sector analytics programs
• Existing favorable federal background investigation