AI/ML Engineer

Kaizen builds modern software for federal agencies. The AI/ML Engineer fine-tunes, adapts, and distills open-weight models into specialized intelligence for its platform, evaluates model performance on real software engineering tasks, and ships improvements into production.

Responsibilities:

• Fine-tune, adapt and distill open-weight models for requirements interpretation, code generation, repository understanding, structured output and software validation
• Own the experiment loop: curate datasets, build training pipelines, and test architectures and techniques until a promising idea becomes a working model
• Build evaluations on real software engineering tasks that set baselines, expose failure modes, and separate real gains from benchmark noise
• Work with platform engineers to find where current models fall short, then build the capabilities that close those gaps and ship them into production
• Experiment with supervised fine-tuning, synthetic data, preference optimization and reinforcement learning to improve model behavior on specialized tasks
• Deliver applications built around each customer's needs without frontier-model token spend, so public budgets go to residents, not inference
• Lay the groundwork (datasets, evals, research practices) for Kaizen to eventually train its own models from scratch