Hybrid AI Engineer – Mission Innovation Lab

at Carnegie Mellon University

• Job title: AI Engineer – Mission Innovation Lab
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Airflow, Docker, ETL, GraphQL, Java, Kubernetes, Python, PyTorch, Ray, React, Tensorflow
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Pittsburgh, United States

About the role

• AI Engineer translating cutting-edge AI concepts into mission-scale solutions for the warfighting community. Collaborate with researchers and government sponsors to develop secure, reliable AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

• translate cutting-edge AI concepts into robust, mission-scale solutions for the warfighting community
• work with large-scale foundation models such as GPT and LLaMA, designing and deploying agentic workflows
• apply and advance traditional ML research and engineering across domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, time series forecasting, and other predictive analytics
• collaborate closely with senior researchers, software engineers, and government sponsors to define problem statements and iterate on experimental designs
• deliver secure, reliable AI capabilities that meet stringent mission requirements
• design, develop, and fine-tune a variety of AI models
• design autonomous agents and multi-step pipelines using LangChain, ReAct, tool-calling, or custom orchestration
• build Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines that combine external knowledge bases with LLMs to improve factual accuracy for warfighting applications
• implement end-to-end data pipelines, ETL processes, and back-end services (Python, C/C++, Java) that feed data to models
• create CI/CD pipelines for model training, validation, containerized deployment (Docker/Kubernetes), and security scanning

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related field
• at least four years of relevant experience (or an M.S. with two years)
• Ability to obtain and maintain an active Department of War (DoW) security clearance
• Proficiency in Python and at least one compiled language (C/C++ or Java)
• Experience with REST/GraphQL APIs and containerization
• Strong grasp of ML theory (supervised, unsupervised, reinforcement learning) and evaluation metrics
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs and using frameworks such as Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, or comparable agent tools
• Familiarity with building RAG pipelines (vector stores, dense/sparse retrievers)
• Experience applying PEFT/LoRA methods (e.g., LoRA, adapters) to large models
• Understanding of Model Context protocols for managing model state across multi-turn interactions
• Experience building evaluation frameworks, benchmarks, or data quality pipelines
• Experience with TensorFlow, PyTorch, or JAX; knowledge of data-pipeline tools (Airflow, Prefect, Ray) is a plus
• Awareness of DevSecOps practices (CI/CD, GitOps, container security scanning, model-registry concepts) is desirable

Benefits

• comprehensive medical, prescription, dental, and vision insurance
• generous retirement savings program with employer contributions
• tuition benefits
• ample paid time off and observed holidays
• life and accidental death and disability insurance
• free Pittsburgh Regional Transit bus pass
• access to Family Concierge Team for childcare needs
• fitness center access
• much more