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About This Role
Clearance Level Top Secret Category Data Science and Data Engineering Location Remote, Working from the USA
Key Skills For Success Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Automation Systems
Data Link
Sensor Fusion
Unmanned System
REQ#:RQ230184
Public Trust:None
Requisition Type:Regular
Your Impact
Own your opportunity to support our nation's defense. Make an impact by connecting and securing critical operations across the globe, keeping our country safe and secure.
Job Description
AI AUTONOMY ENGINEERING SME (UAS, SWARMING, C2, DRONES) Transform technology into operational autonomy.
As an AI Autonomy Engineering SME at GDIT, you will shape the future of autonomous systems for mission‑critical Defense initiatives. Your work will directly support the Defense CTO’s autonomy and AI/ML modernization mission—advancing next‑generation unmanned systems, swarming behaviors, distributed decision‑making, and intelligent C2 architectures.
This role combines deep technical expertise, domain knowledge in UAS/drone operations, and leadership in delivering resilient, scalable autonomy solutions across DoW environments.
MEANINGFUL WORK AND IMPACTLead Autonomy Architecture & System Design
- Design, architect, and implement autonomy capabilities for UAS, drone swarms, robotic platforms, and C2 ecosystems.
- Develop real��time decision‑making algorithms for navigation, sensor fusion, cooperative behaviors, target recognition, and mission execution.
- Engineer multi‑agent coordination frameworks enabling distributed tasking, decentralized control, and swarm intelligence.
Edge AI & Distributed Processing
- Design and deploy AI/ML models onto embedded edge processors, ruggedized compute payloads, and resource‑constrained autonomous platforms.
- Optimize models for real‑time inference, low-latency decision loops, and contested or degraded communication environments.
Simulation, Modeling & Autonomy Validation
- Build and manage large‑scale autonomy simulation environments (e.g., ROS/ROS2, Gazebo, AirSim, custom physics environments).
- Conduct modeling, simulation, and digital‑twin validation to assess behavior, safety, and mission effectiveness.
- Execute hardware‑in‑the‑loop (HIL) and flight testing with UAS payloads and autonomy stacks.
C2 System Integration & Operational Workflows
- Integrate autonomous platforms with DoW C2 systems, tactical networks, and mission‑planning tools.
- Develop APIs and data interfaces supporting observability, command execution, and human‑machine teaming.
- Ensure autonomy behaviors align with CONOPS, TTPs, and operational constraints.
Security, Compliance & Survivability
- Apply DoW cybersecurity controls for autonomous systems, including secure comms, encrypted payloads, and AI model protection.
- Engineer autonomy solutions resilient to GPS denial, EW threats, adversarial conditions, and sensor degradation.
Leadership, Mentorship & Stakeholder Engagement
- Lead and mentor a team of AI/ML, robotics, and software engineers.
- Collaborate with program leaders, operators, mission owners, and technical authorities.
- Communicate complex autonomy concepts to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
Innovation & R&D
- Evaluate emerging autonomy technologies (reinforcement learning, cooperative SLAM, onboard LLM agents, adaptive swarming behaviors).
- Drive rapid experimentation and prototyping to accelerate fieldable capability.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO SUCCEEDEducation
- Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace Engineering, or similar STEM discipline (advanced degree preferred).
Experience
- 15+ years of engineering experience, including significant work in AI/ML, robotics, UAS autonomy, or multi‑agent systems.
- Demonstrated experience developing autonomy capabilities for unmanned or robotic platforms (Defense, commercial, aerospace, or research environments).
Technical Expertise
- Autonomy algorithms: motion planning, path optimization, obstacle avoidance, mapping/SLAM, swarming, multi‑agent coordination.
- AI/ML frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, ONNX.
- Robotics frameworks: ROS/ROS2, MAVLink, PX4/ArduPilot, custom autonomy stacks.
- Simulation: Gazebo, AirSim, FlightGoggles, or equivalent.
- Edge compute: NVIDIA Jetson, VPUs, tactical compute nodes, embedded Linux.
- Distributed systems & C2 integration: data links, tactical protocols, mesh networks, publish/subscribe architectures.
- Software engineering: Python, C++, real‑time systems, containerization, DevSecOps, CI/CD pipelines.
- Cloud/cluster orchestration: Kubernetes, Helm, GitLab CI, ArgoCD.
- IaC: Terraform, Pulumi, Ansible.
- AI/ML system security and DoW cybersecurity compliance.
Clearance Requirements
- U.S. Citizenship required
- Top Secret required with the ability to obtain and maintain a TS/SCI
ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES
- Develop and maintain autonomy algorithms and pipelines—from sensor ingestion to real‑time decision‑making.
- Engineer resilient, scalable autonomy stacks for UAS fleets and multi‑vehicle teams.
- Oversee deployment, monitoring, tuning, and sustainment of autonomous platforms.
- Manage AI/ML model governance, versioning, and auditability.
- Integrate autonomy software with tactical systems, edge devices, and enterprise platforms.
- Lead vulnerability mitigation, patching, and survivability improvements.
- Provide SME guidance on best practices for DevSecOps, autonomy safety, and mission‑critical AI.
GDIT IS YOUR PLACE
At GDIT, the mission is our purpose, and our people are at the center of everything we do.
- Growth: AI-powered career tool that identifies career steps and learning opportunities
- Support: An internal mobility team focused on helping you achieve your career goals
- Rewards: Comprehensive benefits and wellness packages, 401K with company match, and competitive pay and paid time off
- Community: Award-winning culture of innovation and a military-friendly workplace
OWN YOUR OPPORTUNITY
Explore a career at GDIT and you’ll find endless opportunities to grow alongside colleagues who share your sense of ownership and pride in the meaningful work we do.
Work Requirements
Years of Experience 15 + years of related experience
- may vary based on technical training, certification(s), or degree
Certification Travel Required 25-50%
Citizenship U.S. Citizenship Required
Salary and Benefit Information
The likely salary range for this position is $170,144 - $218,500. This is not, however, a guarantee of compensation or salary. Rather, salary will be set based on experience, geographic location and possibly contractual requirements and could fall outside of this range.
Our Identity Verification Process
As part of the hiring process, we will ask you to complete an identity verification process that leverages advanced biometrics and artificial intelligence to ensure authenticity and protect against identity fraud. You are expected to be on camera during virtual interviews. We reserve the right to take your picture to verify your identity and prevent fraud. By proceeding, you authorize the collection, processing, and use of your biometric data for identity verification and security purposes.
About Our Work
We are GDIT. A global technology and professional services company that delivers technology solutions and mission services to every major agency across the U.S. government, defense and intelligence community. Our 26,000 experts extract the power of technology to create immediate value and deliver solutions at the edge of innovation. We operate across 50+ countries worldwide, offering leading mission-ready capabilities in AI, cloud, cyber and software development.
Join our Talent Community to stay up to date on our career opportunities and events at gdit.com/tc.
Equal Opportunity Employer / Individuals with Disabilities / Protected Veterans
Salary Context
This $170K-$218K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At General Dynamics Information Technology, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($194K) sits 8% below the category median. Disclosed range: $170K to $218K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
General Dynamics Information Technology AI Hiring
General Dynamics Information Technology has 11 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, AI Architect, Data Scientist. Positions span Falls Church, VA, US, Sterling, VA, Remote, US. Compensation range: $98K - $253K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $188,000 across 2,316 positions. About 6% of all AI roles offer remote work.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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