AI Developer / Product SME

Overview

We are seeking an experienced AI Developer / Product SME to serve as a technical authority and product-focused subject-matter expert across our predictive and generative AI solution portfolio. This role will provide expert guidance on the architecture, design, development, and delivery of enterprise-grade AI applications—spanning LLM-powered systems, RAG pipelines, agents, multimodal solutions, and custom machine learning models. The AI Developer / Product SME will work closely with engineering, product, UX, evaluation, governance, and client leadership to define AI capabilities that meaningfully support mission outcomes. 

Contributions

• Serve as the senior technical expert for the design and implementation of production AI systems, advising teams on architecture, model selection, orchestration strategies, and optimal development patterns. 

• Lead the creation of scalable, reusable AI components, services, and frameworks that accelerate delivery across the organization. 

• Partner with product teams to translate mission challenges into well-defined AI-enabled features, workflows, and technical requirements. 

• Provide deep expertise on LLMs, embedding models, fine-tuning techniques, agentic systems, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures. 

• Guide engineering teams on best practices for prompt engineering, context management, document processing, evaluation-driven iteration, and safe system design. 

• Collaborate with LLMOps teams to ensure robust deployment patterns, monitoring strategies, inference optimization, and lifecycle management of AI models and pipelines. 

• Conduct technical reviews, validate solution designs, and ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, governance policies, and client goals. 

• Mentor senior engineers and guide teams through complex AI development challenges with a focus on software engineering excellence and user-centered design. 

• Stay current with emerging AI technologies, research, frameworks, and foundational models; evaluate their suitability for client missions and incorporate learnings into practice standards. 

• Act as an expert advisor in client-facing discussions, helping stakeholders understand capability tradeoffs, risks, and opportunities associated with AI solutions. 

• Contribute to the development of accelerators, design patterns, internal best-practice guides, workshops, and training to expand AI delivery maturity across the practice. 

• Represent Steampunk as a thought leader in AI architecture, engineering, and product strategy. 

• You will contribute to the growth of our AI & Data Exploitation Practice! 

Qualifications

• Ability to hold a position of public trust with the U.S. government. 

• Bachelor’s, Master’s, or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, or a related field. 

• 8+ years of experience in AI/ML engineering, software development, or applied AI product development. 

• Deep expertise in modern AI frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, LlamaIndex, and relevant orchestration tools. 

• Proven experience building production-grade generative AI applications, including LLM integration, retrieval pipelines, fine-tuning, embeddings, agents, or multimodal workflows. 

• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) including secure architecture patterns, serverless services, containerization, and distributed compute. 

• Experience developing APIs, microservices, and scalable backend systems that integrate AI capabilities into user-facing applications. 

• Strong ability to frame technical solutions in the context of mission needs and product strategy; ability to influence feature design and roadmap decisions. 

• Familiarity with AI governance principles, safety constraints, evaluation frameworks, and compliance considerations for production AI systems. 

• Excellent communication skills with the ability to articulate complex AI concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, including clients and executives. 

• Demonstrated leadership in mentoring engineers, elevating team performance, and establishing engineering best practices. 

• Preferred certifications: AWS/Azure/GCP ML Specialty, Databricks ML Professional, NIST AI RMF Practitioner (AISIC), NVIDIA DLI Certifications, or similar advanced AI engineering credentials. 

About steampunk