Principal AI Engineer

Principal AI Engineer

Clarity Innovations is a trusted national security partner, dedicated to safeguarding our nation's interests and delivering innovative solutions that empower the Intelligence Community (IC) and Department of Defense (DoD) to transform data into actionable intelligence, ensuring mission success in an evolving world.

Our mission-first software and data engineering platform modernizes data operations, utilizing advanced workflows, CI/CD, and secure DevSecOps practices. We focus on challenges in Information Warfare, Cyber Operations, Operational Security, and Data Structuring, enabling end-to-end solutions that drive operational impact.

We are committed to delivering cutting-edge tools and capabilities that address the most complex national security challenges, empowering our partners to stay ahead of emerging threats and ensuring the success of their critical missions. At Clarity, we are people-focused and set on being a destination employer for top talent, offering an environment where innovation thrives, careers grow, and individuals are valued. Join us as we continue to lead innovation and tackle the most pressing challenges in national security.

Principal AI Engineer

Location: Herndon, VA (On-site)

Experience Level: 6-10 years of experience

Security Clearance: TS/SCI Required

Overview

Clarity Innovations is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to join the AI Enablement Team. In this role, you will be a key contributor to operationalizing, securing, and maturing artificial intelligence capabilities within the Joint Development Environment (JDE) and various operational platform environments. You will help build and maintain the AI "path-to-prod," ensuring a stable and scalable AI technical stack across multiple mission operational environments and development spaces for various cyber tools and capabilities. Our project lays the AI "plumbing" for accessing models and inference through a continually evolving single AI run stack.

Background

This project is focused on providing a unified interface for AI model access, enabling users to leverage both local open-source and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) managed models (such as AWS Bedrock and Azure OpenAI). The project aims to supercharge users by integrating AI access, tools, and frameworks into their workflows, from general content creation to advanced AI-powered development tools. You will be working with Clarity's AI access platform, to centralize API management and streamline AI enablement. In addition, you will provide expert recommendations for adoption of AI across various enterprise teams to include agentic orchestration, spec-driven development, and MLOps workflows.

Primary Responsibilities

• Contribute to the build-out and day-to-day execution of the AI access platform and the AI run stack, based on K8s
• Manage and automate the deployment of core AI services using a standardized K8s framework
• Facilitate the integration and serving of various frontier models (e.g., Claude, GPT) and local inference engines (e.g., vLLM) through OpenAI-compatible interfaces and AI access gateways (e.g., Open WebUI).
• Design and implement MLOps pipelines to support the full lifecycle of AI-enabled applications.
• Help inform the standards of AI-enabled development the enterprise customer and development teams should adopt (i.e., spec-driven standards for agentic development, AI-coding workflows, skills libraries, etc.)
• Help inform and develop MCP-based tools to improve the platform and team workflows / tasks

Requirements

• Ability to collaborate as a team but execute independently
• Thrives in a high-trust, adaptable team environment
• Proficiency in working with Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic workflows.
• Strong proficiency in modern programming languages (e.g., Python, Go) and building/consuming RESTful APIs
• Proficient with Kubernetes (K8s) deployment strategies, cluster lifecycle (deployment, troubleshooting, scaling), and container orchestration
• Ability to be high side / on customer site 2-3 days per week on average (in Herndon, VA headquarters and then occasionally traveling to customer site in Columbia, MD)

Education & Experience

• 6-10 years of professional experience in software engineering, with a significant focus on AI/ML and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related technical field.

Nice-To-Haves

• Experience working with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, Nemo Agent Toolkit, and NIMs
• Experience with K8s-based platforms, including declarative deployments, GitOps (e.g., ArgoCD, FluxCD)
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry (OTEL) for tracking LLM traces, metrics, and inference tracking (FinOps workflows)
• Experience working within the cyberspace domain and offensive cyber operations
• TS/SCI w/ CI Poly (TS/SCI is required, Poly is nice-to-have)

We are 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, disability, or veteran status.