Software Developer Specialist

Our client is currently seeking a Software Developer Specialist
DESCRIPTION OF SERVICES
Texas Department of Transportation requires the services of 1 Software Developer Specialist, hereafter referred to as Candidate(s), who meets the general qualifications of Software Developer Specialist, Applications/Software Development and the specifications outlined in this document for the Texas Department of Transportation.

All work products resulting from the project shall be considered \"works made for hire\" and are the property of the Texas Department of Transportation and may include pre-selection requirements that potential Vendors (and their Candidates) submit to and satisfy criminal background checks as authorized by Texas law. Texas Department of Transportation will pay no fees for interviews or discussions, which occur during the process of selecting a Candidate(s).

A Software Developer Specialist will focus on engineering-related software services, including model ingestion, automated quantity extraction, plan conformance checks, and CI/CD automation. Leveraging PEPS ensures compliance with procurement regulations while enabling rapid onboarding of specialized talent.

The Senior Software Developer Specialist will be responsible for advancing TxDOT's AI initiatives by extending existing proof-of-concept (POC) solutions into scalable, production-ready web applications that directly support transportation engineering workflows. This role will focus on transforming early-stage AI models and prototypes-such as those supporting plan review automation, roadway asset detection, and digital delivery-into fully integrated applications accessible through secure, user-friendly web interfaces across the enterprise.

Required:
Cloud Platforms: Experience with AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI for deploying and managing ML workloads. We leverage AI/ML tools across all major cloud providers (Azure AI, AWS SageMaker/Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI, OCI AI Services).
DevOps: Ansible, CI/CD, Docker and Kubernetes experience.
Databases: SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL/vector databases.
Scripting: Proficient in both Bash and PowerShell for automation.
CI/CD Experience: Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar automation pipelines.
Python: 3-5+ years production experience, this is your primary language.
NLP/LLMs: Experience with transformers (BERT, GPT, T5), RAG systems, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, or building LLM applications.
Time Series: Forecasting models, anomaly detection, sequential data modeling, or real-time monitoring systems.
Recommender Systems: Collaborative filtering, ranking models, personalization engines, or content recommendations.
MLOps Tools: Production experience with MLflow, Weights & Biases, Kubeflow, Airflow, or similar platforms.
Distributed Training: Large-scale model training, multi-GPU/multi-node setups, efficient data parallelism.
Computer Vision: Production CV experience with PyTorch/TensorFlow, OpenCV, YOLO, object detection, segmentation, or real-time inference.
Feature stores (Feast, Tecton) or advanced feature engineering.
Model optimization: quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation.
LLM Models: Ollama, Huggingface, or other non-frontier models
AI/ML Production: Built and deployed 2-3+ ML models serving real users, not just experiments.

Preferred:
Experience with Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and analyzing spatial data.
Prior experience in the transportation, logistics, or smart city sectors.
Background in Computer Vision (object detection, image segmentation) applied to infrastructure or vehicular data.
Familiarity with public sector data compliance, security, and governance standards.
Experience with the Unreal gaming engine and real world digital twinning
Experience with Google Maps Cesium API
Experience with Polygonflow Dash and its capabilities