Senior AI Engineer

About the role

Leidos is seeking a Senior AI Engineer in its Intel Sector to support high-impact mission opportunities by applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to complex data and analytic challenges. Engineers work with mission stakeholders to turn operational needs into secure, scalable AI capabilities covering machine learning, large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic AI and advanced knowledge systems. The role sits within a prototype development program focused on rapid prototyping, new development and advanced technology research.

Key responsibilities

• Collaborate with mission stakeholders, analysts, data scientists and engineers to turn operational challenges into effective AI/ML solutions.
• Design and develop capabilities for knowledge extraction, information discovery, summarization, decision support, workflow automation and analysis of structured and unstructured data.
• Build solutions that process large, complex, potentially multilingual datasets so that AI-generated results are relevant, traceable and useful.
• Develop LLM applications using prompt engineering, embeddings, context management, chunking and retrieval techniques.
• Design RAG architectures with document ingestion, vector search, metadata, reranking and hybrid semantic/keyword retrieval.
• Develop agentic AI workflows for task planning, tool use, multi-step execution and multi-agent coordination.
• Build data pipelines for preprocessing, feature extraction, validation, deduplication, labeling and augmentation.
• Optimize models through selection, fine-tuning, hyperparameter tuning, benchmarking and latency-versus-accuracy analysis.

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, plus 8 years of relevant experience or equivalent.
• Strong proficiency with Python and demonstrated experience designing or developing AI/ML solutions.
• Understanding of the full AI lifecycle, from data ingestion and model development through deployment, monitoring and sustainment.
• Active TS/SCI security clearance with polygraph required.

Required skills

• Python and modern AI frameworks; supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and deep learning techniques.
• Transformer architectures and knowledge of LLMs, tokenization, embeddings and attention.
• RAG, vector search and knowledge retrieval systems.
• Desirable: knowledge of customer corporate tools, data repositories and secure mission computing environments.

What we offer

• Paid time off and 11 paid holidays.
• 401K with a 6% company match and immediate vesting.
• Flexible schedules, discounted stock purchase plans and technical upskilling.
• Educational and training support and parental paid leave.