Intelligent Automation Lead (Federal Applied AI)

Intelligent Automation Lead (Federal Applied AI)

Location: Remote (U.S.), with periodic onsite meetings in the Washington, DC metropolitan area



Employment type: Full-time; contingent upon contract award



Eligibility: U.S. citizenship required; must be able to obtain and maintain a Federal Public Trust background investigation



Reports to: Program Manager

About the role

Zenius is seeking a technical lead to design, build, and operate an intelligent automation and decision-support capability for a Federal client. The solution will help a team of analysts process high volumes of reports and related documents: retrieving and reconciling source data, extracting structured information from unstructured reports, proposing regulatory citations from a controlled library, producing first drafts for human review, and reporting workload and quality metrics on dashboards. The solution will integrate with existing agency systems of record without modifying them, and will keep a human reviewer on every AI-assisted output. You will lead a small engineering team and be the primary technical counterpart to the agency's IT and security organizations.

What you will do

• Design the solution architecture (data ingestion, document intelligence, decision support, and workflow layers) and obtain the required platform, security, and privacy approvals.
• Plan and deliver the capability in quarterly increments, demonstrating each increment to the client and placing it into production only after documented evaluation.
• Build and tune extraction of structured data from reports and related PDF documents; define confidence thresholds and routing rules for human review.
• Implement rules-based prioritization, a versioned citation library, and first-draft generation from client templates, with controls that require a named human reviewer before any output is used.
• Integrate with existing systems of record through data extracts, exports, and document uploads, and reconcile every batch.
• Evaluate every capability against held-out test sets before live use; report precision, recall, and error analysis; log every AI-assisted output with model, version, inputs, output, and reviewer edits; monitor accuracy and drift; run the incident process.
• Produce and maintain the AI use-case documentation the agency needs under OMB guidance on Federal AI use and acquisition; ensure client data is not used to train or improve models outside the client's environment.
• Deliver workload, aging, timeliness, and quality dashboards and supply data for monthly status reporting.
• Maintain all code, prompts, configurations, evaluation sets, and workflow definitions under source control with documentation sufficient for the client to operate the solution.
• Lead the data and automation engineers; set standards for code review, testing, accessibility (Section 508), and security.

What you bring

• Eight or more years delivering data, workflow automation, or application solutions for Federal agencies, including at least three years delivering applied AI, natural language processing, or document intelligence capabilities into production use.
• Hands-on experience building within a Federal authorized environment (FedRAMP-authorized cloud or an agency-authorized platform) and working through agency security and authorization processes.
• Demonstrated experience designing human-in-the-loop review workflows, setting confidence thresholds and routing rules, and evaluating model outputs with held-out test sets and documented metrics.
• Experience integrating with legacy or file-based systems of record where direct APIs are not available.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL, REST APIs, and at least one dashboard or reporting toolset; experience with source control, automated testing, and controlled releases.
• Working familiarity with OMB guidance on Federal agency AI use and acquisition and with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework.
• The ability to explain technical design and evaluation results to non-technical staff.
• U.S. citizenship and eligibility for a Federal Public Trust background investigation.

Nice to have

• Experience with Federal grants management, audit, or financial compliance workflows.
• Experience with robotic process automation, optical character recognition, large-scale PDF parsing, retrieval-grounded generation, or prompt and configuration management under version control.
• Cloud or AI professional certifications (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) and an agile delivery credential; Section 508 conformance testing experience.

About Zenius

Zenius Corporation is a HUBZone-certified small business headquartered in Leesburg, Virginia. Since 2015, we have supported Federal agencies with grants management, program and project management, independent verification and validation, financial management, acquisition support, and digital modernization services. Zenius has been recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies and the Financial Times list of the Americas' fastest-growing companies. We are a small team that values judgment, craftsmanship, and direct accountability to the client.

Zenius Corporation is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, or protected veteran status.