AI/ML Engineer

Leidos’ National Security Sector is seeking an AI/ML Engineer to join our growing Advantage Decision Solutions team within our National Security Sector. We are looking for a researcher who is expert in envisioning, developing, and securing AI agents using generative AI and LLM-based tools to transform and add value to human workflows.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Write software code to support AI agent communication, connecting models and agents to external services via API calls, support testing and debugging tasks, deployment into target environments, setting up monitoring, and ensuring reliable execution of agentic AI systems. 
• Utilize a combination of open source models, agentic tools, and large proprietary commercial models to develop novel approaches to securing agentic workflows and to evaluating the results for accuracy, performance, and impact. 
• Ensure AI systems adhere to ethical guidelines, transparency, and fairness principles.
• Conduct research, develop prototypes, evaluate and document results, potentially through publication and presentation at conferences and other public forums. 
• Be part of a team developing solutions for deployment into operational environments, or for integration into mission systems. 

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, Mathematics, or a related field and 4+ years of hands-on experience in machine learning and/or AI systems development.
• US citizenship is required and able to obtain and maintain security clearance (Secret level or above)
• Practical experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) and agent frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, PydanticAI, CoPilotKit, A2A, MCP.
• Integrate agentic AI systems through tools such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), memory/context management, and vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS).
• Experience working with end users to streamline workflows and produce applied solutions.
• Ability to design and implement tool-using AI agents, including API integration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and memory/context management.
• Experience integrating agents with cloud-native workflows, streaming data pipelines, and real-time decision-making environments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to present complex AI outputs in an accessible manner to non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience working in national security or defense environments.
• Active Secret or Top Secret clearance (or eligibility to obtain one).
• Deep familiarity with generative AI techniques like prompt engineering, chain‑of‑thought, and NLP tasks (entity extraction, summarization, semantic search).
• Experience integrating AI services (e.g., NIMS, Azure OpenAI, Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI).
• Scripting proficiency (e.g., Linux Bash, PowerShell).
• GPU programming experience with CUDA, PyTorch, or TensorFlow for ML workload optimization.
• Knowledge of building agent safety measures, guardrails, bias mitigation strategies, and designing multi-agent loops (e.g., plan–execute–reflect).
• Experience using observability tools for agents (e.g., LangSmith, OpenAI Evals).

At Leidos, we don’t want someone who "fits the mold"—we want someone who melts it down and builds something better. This is a role for the restless, the over-caffeinated, the ones who ask, “what’s next?” before the dust settles on “what’s now.”

If you’re already scheming step 20 while everyone else is still debating step 2… good. You’ll fit right in.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.