Senior AI Technologist at ARA

United States

Essential Functions: * Identify, evaluate, and prioritize opportunities to integrate AI into existing and new organizational processes and tooling. * Design and implement data structures, metadata models, naming conventions, and data standards to support AI and machine learning initiatives. * Support onboarding new AI projects by identifying data requirements, assessing data readiness, and defining ingestion and preparation workflows. * Develop processes to measure and improve ongoing data quality, consistency, completeness, and accuracy across AI datasets and workflows. * Build and maintain data preparation pipelines to support model training, testing, retrieval, and operational AI applications. * Collaborate with technical and business stakeholders across divisions to understand data sources, use cases, and operational constraints. * Create and maintain documentation for data standards, transformation logic, onboarding procedures, and quality controls. * Partner with AI, software, platform, and security teams to ensure data workflows are scalable, secure, and aligned with organizational objectives. Experience and Skills Required: * Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related STEM field 8-10 years of engineering experience * 3+ years of experience supporting AI, natural language processing, RAG, and related solutions. * Experience preparing and transforming data for analytics, machine learning, search, or AI-enabled applications. * Experience designing vector databases and retrieval pipelines. * Experience developing MCP Servers and Clients. * Understanding of data quality management practices, including validation, normalization, deduplication, and error handling. * Experience working with AI platforms, Kubernetes, and cloud AI environments (Azure Foundry, AWS Bedrock). * Strong experience developing AI solutions in Python, Golang, or Typescript. * Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and documentation skills. Preferred: * Experience with data platforms and tooling such as Pandas, Spark, Airflow, dbt, or similar ecosystems. * Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings pipelines, chunking strategies, and retrieval-augmented generation workflows. * Experience designing data schemas, taxonomies, ontologies, or metadata standards for enterprise information. * Experience working in regulated environments with standards such as NIST or CMMC. * Experience supporting scientific, engineering, defense, or national security-related data initiatives. * Experience working with DevOps systems, git, CI/CD, GitOps. * DoD experience. * Active Secret clearance preferred, or ability to obtain and maintain a Secret clearance. Education: * Bachelor’s degree in CS, Software Engineering or other IT-related field or equivalent experience REMOTE WORK NOTICE: This position may be performed fully remote, hybrid, or onsite at an ARA office. Preference will be given to candidates located onsite in the Albuquerque, NM and Raleigh, NC area.