AI​/ML Engineer; Language Model; TS​/SCI; S

ARKA Group L.P. (“ARKA”) is an advanced technologies company serving the U.S. military, intelligence community, and commercial space industry delivering next-generation solutions to support the national security space enterprise. Built on more than six decades of excellence, ARKA brings modern approaches and a culture of innovation to the challenges of today.

Join the ARKA team to learn how Beyond Begins Here. Discover your next career opportunity now!

The Staff AI/ML Engineer (LLMs) will lead the development of Agentic AI capabilities and other LLM based capabilities for a multitude of mission management applications.

We offer generous relocation benefits for eligible candidates.

In support of work/life balance, many positions are available for a flexible schedule within the pay period. Ask us about the opportunity for flex scheduling if that’s of interest to you.

• Lead and mentor a multidisciplined team consisting of developers and researchers to implement machine learning algorithms to solve a broad set of challenges for our various customers
• Lead and mentor a multidisciplinary team delivering advanced AI/ML solutions
• Apply LLMs to complex domain-specific problems and operational workflows
• Adapt and fine-tune foundation models for specialized use cases
• Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and semantic search architectures
• Build production-grade LLM applications and agentic systems
• Deploy scalable AI solutions across cloud, on-prem, and hybrid environments
• Analyze large, multi-modal datasets to extract meaningful features and actionable insights
• Translate emerging research into applied, mission-relevant capabilities
• Communicate technical strategy, status, and risks to internal and external leadership

• B.S. in machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or related fields
• 8+ years of experience, preferably in software development or as a data scientist with 2+ years of building LLM applications using some of the following:
  • Fine-tuning foundational models
  • Steering Techniques (e.g Sparse auto encoders, representation tuning)
  • Building adapters to use foundational models (e.g. PEFT, llama factory)
  • Prompt engineering techniques / Inference time techniques (e.g. chain of thought, tree of thoughts, etc.)
  • Using Retrieval Augmented Generation techniques to populate and query vector databases (e.g. Weaviate, pinecone, pgvector)
  • Using LLM Frameworks (e.g. Lang Chain, DSPy, Microsoft Agent Framework)
  • Using AI APIs ( e.g AWS Bedrock, OpenAI)
  • Using LLM deployment frameworks (eg llama.cpp, vllm, tgi)
  • Developing UIs with Re Act
• Experience leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers and software developers and working with a program manager to define project scope and schedule to ensure we meet project milestones as defined by our customers
• Experience with Python and data science / machine learning libraries (e.g. Num Py, Pandas, Polars, scikit-learn, etc.)
• Experience contributing on a team using version control (e.g. git, Git Lab, Bitbucket)
• Active TS/SCI U.S. Government Security Clearance

• M.S. or PhD in machine learning, computer science, mathematics, or related fields
• Experience leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers and software developers
• Experience with any of the following:
  • Large Language Models and experience identifying ways to incorporate them into new domains and applications
  • Applying Transformer-based architectures to domains in other areas outside of Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as computer vision
  • Natural Language Processing algorithms such as BERT
  • Reinforcement learning and familiarity with Gymnasium Gym, Open Env, Torch
    
    RL, RLlib, and Stable Baselines
  • Applying clustering algorithms and/or deep neural networks to real life problems
  • Implementing tracking and pattern-of-life algorithms
  • Experience with GenAI Ops techniques (e.g. LLM-as-a-judge) and frameworks (e.g. Lang Fuse, MLFlow, Arize Phoenix)
  • Experience with Machine Learning libraries and frameworks such as Hugging Face and Lang Chain
  • Experience with Linux
  • Experience with CUDA and Python libraries such as CuPy, Numba, CuSignal, CuDF, etc.
  • Famil…