AI Research Assistant

About the role

The Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence & Security (ARLIS) at the University of Maryland seeks an AI Research Assistant to support the DE Bioeffects project. Working closely with the AI/ML lead, you will help develop and refine sense‑making technology that leverages retrieval and language‑model systems.

Key responsibilities

• Attend project meetings on request of the PI, co‑PIs, and AI/ML lead and take technical notes as needed.
• Collaborate with a large interdisciplinary team to solve technical challenges.
• Assist in building, evaluating, and fine‑tuning retrieval and language‑model pipelines.
• Maintain documentation of experiments, code, and results.

Required profile

• Currently enrolled in a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Doctoral program in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Linguistics/NLP, Information Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering, or a closely related field.
• Hands‑on experience (through coursework, research, internship, or personal project) building at least one end‑to‑end retrieval system and training or fine‑tuning at least one language model.
• Eligibility to obtain a U.S. security clearance (Secret interim clearance required before start).

Required skills

• Design and implementation of retrieval systems.
• Training and fine‑tuning of language‑model architectures.

What we offer

• Opportunity to contribute to nationally important research in intelligence and security.
• Collaboration with leading scientists, engineers, and analysts.
• Professional growth within a culture that values integrity and teamwork.