AI Systems Engineer

Title:

KBR is seeking a visionary AI Systems Engineer to join our team providing critical technical services to the U.S. Government (USG). This role supports a dedicated USG Program Office in shaping designing and deploying cutting-edge AI and Machine Learning (AI/ML) initiatives for national security space architectures.

Position Overview

As an AI Systems Engineer you will serve as both a hands-on technical architect and a strategic advisor. You will leverage the Government customers massive enterprise datasets spanning complex program budgets scheduling and financials to build proof-of-concept models (including Large Language Models and financial predictive tools). You will lead the evolution of the AI roadmap by identifying cutting-edge commercial technologies and directing successful prototypes into robust production-ready enterprise tools.

Responsibilities

• Strategic LLM Initiatives: Help shape and define the AI/ML roadmap for the Government customer office. Guide the government on how to securely build adopt govern and maintain foundation models and custom LLMs across sensitive environments ensuring robust model lifecycle management.
• Rapid Prototyping: Design and build hands-on high-impact proof-of-concept models. This includes training fine-tuning and leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for search summarization and business intelligence as well as developing advanced financial budget and scheduling analysis models.
• Data Exploitation: Work directly with massive unstructured and structured enterprise datasets (financials acquisition timelines schedules program execution metrics). Clean curate and pipeline this data to create high-quality training corpora instruction-tuning datasets and knowledge bases for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to discover trends anomalies and optimization opportunities
• Technology Curation & Scouting: Actively scout the commercial tech sector academia and open-source communities for breakthroughs in generative AI NLP and predictive analytics. Curate a pipeline of high-performing external groups and technologies for USG consideration.
• Contractor & Vendor Management: Formulate technical recommendations draft statements of work and establish the system integration requirements needed to bring external contractors on board to scale and operationalize your prototypes.
• Technical SETA Advisory: Provide objective technical evaluation of contractor proposals designs and deliverables to ensure they align with government AI safety security and performance standards. This includes overseeing LLM red-teaming bias testing hallucination mitigation and ongoing alignment evaluations.

Work Environment

• Location: On-Site (Chantilly VA area)
• Travel Requirements: Minimal (0-20%)
• Working Hours: Standard

Required Qualifications

• Clearance: Active TS/SCI with Polygraph.
• Education & Experience:
  • Bachelors degree with 5 years of relevant experience
  • Masters degree with 3 years of relevant experience or
  • PhD with 0 years of relevant experience.
• Technical Skills: Strong foundations in AI/ML concepts natural language processing (NLP) and statistical modeling.
• Prototyping Experience: Demonstrated experience building prototypes using Python R or similar tools specifically with frameworks related to LLMs (e.g. LangChain Hugging Face) or data analytics.
• Analytical Skills: Experience working with complex enterprise datasets (e.g. financial resource planning schedule networks or programmatic data).
• Communication: Exceptional ability to translate highly technical AI conceptssuch as LLM training methodologies RAG architecture model alignment and corpus curationinto strategic actionable business recommendations for non-technical executives and government leaders. This includes clearly articulating the compute costs security risks data provenance and ongoing maintenance requirements involved in building versus adopting language models.

Desired Qualifications

• Financial & Schedule Modeling: Experience applying ML or advanced statistical modeling to predictive financial analysis budget execution risk modeling or project scheduling.
• Enterprise AI Deployment: Understanding of the challenges of deploying AI/ML models in high-security air-gapped government cloud environments (e.g. AWS C2S).
• Technology Scouting: Prior experience in technology scouting venture capital technical vetting or acting as an industry-to-government technology transition agent.
• Acquisition Support: Familiarity with the DoD/IC acquisition lifecycle systems engineering processes and SETA advisory roles.

Basic Compensation:

$152600 - $190700

This range is for the Virginia area only

The offered rate will be based on the selected candidates work location knowledge skills abilities and/or experience clearance level contract affordability and in consideration of internal parity.

KBR Benefits

KBR offers a selection of competitive lifestyle benefits which could include 401K plan with company match medical dental vision life insurance AD&D flexible spending account disability paid time off or flexible work schedule. We support career advancement through professional training and development.

Belong Connect and Grow at KBR

At KBR we are passionate about our people and our Zero Harm culture. These inform all that we do and are at the heart of our commitment to and ongoing journey toward being a People First company. That commitment is central to our team of teams philosophy and fosters an environment where everyone can Belong Connect and Grow. We Deliver Together.

KBR is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race color religion disability sex sexual orientation gender identity or expression age national origin veteran status genetic information union status and/or beliefs or any other characteristic protected by federal state or local law.