Role overview
Senior Data Engineer
Job ID#: 25-1071
Clearance: Secret
Location: Herndon, VA
Who We Are
Since our inception back in 2006, Navitas has grown to be an industry leader in the digital transformation space, and we’ve served as trusted advisors supporting our client base within the commercial, federal, and state and local markets.
What We Do
At our very core, we’re a group of problem solvers providing our award-winning technology solutions to drive digital acceleration for our customers! With proven solutions, award-winning technologies, and a team of expert problem solvers, Navitas has consistently empowered customers to use technology as a competitive advantage and deliver cutting-edge transformative solutions.
What You’ll Do
Navitas is seeking an advanced Senior ML Engineer with NLP to design, build, and deploy scalable AI/ML models for use within the DoD's Search Portfolio. This role requires a strong background in natural language processing, generative AI (LLMs, RAG), distributed computing, and cloud-native architecture. The successful candidate will collaborate with interdisciplinary teams and apply the latest advancements in AI research to deliver secure, mission-ready solutions that process and analyze massive datasets.
What you'll work on
- Design, develop, test, and support AI/ML pipelines on Databricks using Python to support a variety of Department of Defense (DoD) technical missions.
- Develop and operationalize NLP solutions for large datasets using modern techniques such as context extraction, topic extraction, and keyword extraction (e.g., RAKE, TF-IDF, and other statistical or embedding-based methods).
- Leverage advanced NLP libraries and frameworks including Spark NLP, Hugging Face, and TensorFlow to design and deploy scalable machine-learning models.
- Build, train, and deploy GPU-based models optimized for performance and cost-efficiency across distributed compute environments (Apache Spark/Databricks/Kubernetes).
- Apply MLOps best practices using MLflow for model lifecycle management, experiment tracking, and reproducibility.
- Integrate AI capabilities with Elasticsearch and Neo4j to enhance search, graph analytics, and semantic understanding across enterprise datasets.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams of data scientists, software engineers, and mission stakeholders to integrate AI/ML capabilities across the Search Portfolio and other data products.
- Manage the full lifecycle of AI/ML components, from research and model development through deployment, monitoring, and iterative improvement.
- Diagnose and solve complex data challenges using analytical modeling, AI-driven reasoning, and modern informatics techniques.
- Document and present technical design alternatives, trade-offs, and implementation strategies to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Build and maintain shared ML tools, libraries, and reusable assets to accelerate innovation and ensure engineering consistency.
- Support strategic AI roadmap development and architectural planning to enable rapid prototyping and experimentation with advanced AI capabilities.
- Ensure compliance, security, and traceability in all AI/ML workflows and infrastructure aligned with DoD and federal standards.