Principal Data Scientist

Role Description

TEKsystems is partnered with a software company in Raleigh that needs to hire a Senior Data Scientist for their flagship product, a leading global provider of information and analytics. Recently our client has focused on the general availability of their product for U.S. customers, a generative AI solution designed to transform legal work. Their product delivers trusted results in a familiar, easy-to-use interface with linked hallucination-free legal citations that combine the power of generative AI with proprietary search technology, Shepard’s® Citations functionality, and authoritative content.

This role leads the design and development of an advanced multi-agent AI platform that powers intelligent research, drafting, and reasoning capabilities for large-scale enterprise knowledge environments. You will architect agent frameworks, optimize retrieval-augmented generation pipelines, fine-tune language models, and build the infrastructure that enables AI systems to collaborate, plan, and execute complex tasks reliably. The work directly shapes the next generation of AI-driven professional tools used by experts in high-stakes domains.

Core Responsibilities

• Architect and implement multi-agent systems capable of planning, tool use, and coordinated task execution.
• Design and optimize RAG pipelines including embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and context-window strategies.
• Fine-tune and evaluate small, medium, and large language models for domain-specific reasoning and summarization.
• Develop prompt engineering frameworks, guardrails, and automated evaluation suites for agent reliability.
• Build scalable ML services and APIs for production deployment in distributed environments.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and domain experts to translate complex workflows into agentic AI solutions.
• Establish best practices for model evaluation, observability, safety, and compliance.
• Mentor DS/ML engineers and contribute to long-term AI strategy and architecture.

Qualifications

• 6–12+ years in Data Science / ML Engineering, with deep experience in LLM-based systems.
• Proven experience building agentic architectures (planner-executor, tool-use agents, ReAct-style reasoning).
• Strong background in RAG, embeddings, retrieval optimization, and evaluation.
• Expertise in NLP, transformers, deep learning, and model fine-tuning.
• Proficiency with PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain/LlamaIndex, Ray, Kubernetes, and vector databases.
• Experience designing production-grade ML systems with monitoring, evaluation, and observability.
• Strong communication skills and ability to lead technical direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in enterprise search, knowledge management, or high-compliance domains.
• Experience with model distillation, LoRA/QLoRA, PEFT, and model compression.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for hallucination, grounding, and agent reliability.
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs, symbolic reasoning, or hybrid neuro-symbolic systems.
• Publications, patents, or open-source contributions in LLMs or agent systems.
• Strong coding skills in Python (7+ years).
• Natural problem solver, able to take a lead in collaborating to resolve issues.
• Proficiency in IDE debugging: VSCODE and PYCHARM.
• 5+ years of experience in AI and machine learning.
• Deep understanding of machine learning algorithms, classification models, diagnostic testing of models.
• Experience working directly with Transformer-based architectures including BERT, RoBERTa, T5, etc., and familiarity with large language models and fine-tuning.
• Experience with conversational search / semantic search, reinforcement learning, prompt engineering, hallucination mitigation.
• Working understanding of the business risks associated with applying LLM (LangChain) in a business.
• Experience working with AWS, RAG, SageMaker, SQL.

Requirements

• Expert Level experience.
• Contract to Hire position based out of Raleigh, NC.

Benefits

• Medical, dental & vision.
• Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan – Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available.
• Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents).
• Short and long-term disability.
• Health Spending Account (HSA).
• Transportation benefits.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave).

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Jul 31, 2026.