Senior AI Technologist

Description Essential Functions: Identify, evaluate, and prioritize opportunities to integrate AI into existing and new organizational processes and tooling. Design and implement data structures, metadata models, naming conventions, and data standards to support AI and machine learning initiatives. Support onboarding new AI projects by identifying data requirements, assessing data readiness, and defining ingestion and preparation workflows. Develop processes to measure and improve ongoing data quality, consistency, completeness, and accuracy across AI datasets and workflows. Build and maintain data preparation pipelines to support model training, testing, retrieval, and operational AI applications. Collaborate with technical and business stakeholders across divisions to understand data sources, use cases, and operational constraints. Create and maintain documentation for data standards, transformation logic, onboarding procedures, and quality controls. Partner with AI, software, platform, and security teams to ensure data workflows are scalable, secure, and aligned with organizational objectives. Experience and Skills Required: Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related STEM field 8-10 years of engineering experience 3+ years of experience supporting AI, natural language processing, RAG, and related solutions. Experience preparing and transforming data for analytics, machine learning, search, or AI-enabled applications. Experience designing vector databases and retrieval pipelines. Experience developing MCP Servers and Clients. Understanding of data quality management practices, including validation, normalization, deduplication, and error handling. Experience working with AI platforms, Kubernetes, and cloud AI environments (Azure Foundry, AWS Bedrock). Strong experience developing AI solutions in Python, Golang, or Typescript. Strong analytical, troubleshooting, and documentation skills. Preferred: Experience with data platforms and tooling such as Pandas, Spark, Airflow, dbt, or similar ecosystems. Familiarity with vector databases, embeddings pipelines, chunking strategies, and retrieval-augmented generation workflows. Experience designing data schemas, taxonomies, ontologies, or metadata standards for enterprise information. Experience working in regulated environments with standards such as NIST or CMMC. Experience supporting scientific, engineering, defense, or national security-related data initiatives. Experience working with DevOps systems, git, CI/CD, GitOps. DoD experience. Active Secret clearance preferred, or ability to obtain and maintain a Secret clearance. Education: Bachelor’s degree in CS, Software Engineering or other IT-related field or equivalent experience REMOTE WORK NOTICE: This position may be performed fully remote, hybrid, or onsite at an ARA office. Preference will be given to candidates located onsite in the Albuquerque, NM and Raleigh, NC area.