Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at General Dynamics Information Technology?
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About This Role
Clearance Level Top Secret SCI + Polygraph Category Data Science and Data Engineering Location McLean, Virginia (Onsite Workplace)
Key Skills For Success Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Keras
Language Models
PyTorch
Tensorflow
REQ#:RQ229011
Public Trust:None
Requisition Type:Regular
Your Impact
Own your opportunity to serve as a critical component of our nation’s safety and security. Make an impact by using your expertise to protect our country from threats.
Job Description
Seize your opportunity to make a personal impact as an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Engineer. GDIT is your place to make meaningful contributions to challenging projects and grow a rewarding career.
At GDIT, people are our differentiator. As a Machine Learning Engineer, you will help ensure today is safe and tomorrow is smarter.
HOW A MACHINE LEARNING ENGINEER WILL MAKE AN IMPACT
- Develop and adapt Large Language Models (LLM) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) frameworks and programming languages to create new capabilities to improve analytic workflows and address key intelligence questions.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO SUCCEED:
- Education: Bachelor or Master’s Degree in an IT discipline or the equivalent combination of education, technical certifications or training, or work experience
- Experience: 8+ years
- Technical skills:
- Professional or academic experience working with modern deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or Keras. (Key Experience)
- Hands‑on experience using GPUs for accelerated computing. (Key Experience)
- Experience tuning neural networks (including LLMs) on custom datasets and applying them to specific use cases.
- Experience building AI/ML models and ensembles, selecting appropriate Python libraries, preparing data, performing analyses, and evaluating model performance.
- Proficiency in Python or R
- Solid SQL skills, including working with to include using common table expressions, set operations, aggregated functions and nested subqueries.
- Experience using version control tools such as GitHub and Jenkins.
- Security Clearance Level: TS/SCI with Polygraph
- Location: McLean, VA, On Customer Site
- Skills and abilities desired:
- Experience working with Hugging Face Transformers and its model hub.
- Experience with cloud‑based development and architecture.
- Experience with front‑end or application frameworks like Flask.
- Ability to build text‑focused machine learning solutions (classification, topic modeling) using SciKit‑Learn or deep‑learning approaches.
- Experience developing applications for semantic search.
- Proficiency creating dashboards and visualizations in Tableau.
- Ability to communicate modeling decisions, methodologies, and results clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences.
- Experience building or using verification and validation test benches.
- Familiarity with Explainable AI (XAI) techniques.
- Experience working with ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange).
- US Citizenship Required
GDIT IS YOUR PLACE:
- 401K with company match
- Comprehensive health and wellness packages
- Internal mobility team dedicated to helping you own your career
- Professional growth opportunities including paid education and certifications
- Cutting-edge technology you can learn from
- Rest and recharge with paid vacation and holidays
#OpportunityOwned
#GDITCareers
#WeAreGDIT
#JET
#GDITEnhanced2026
#VA_2026Alumni
Work Requirements
Years of Experience 8 + years of related experience
- may vary based on technical training, certification(s), or degree
Certification Travel Required Less than 10%
Citizenship U.S. Citizenship Required
Salary and Benefit Information
The likely salary range for this position is $168,300 - $227,700. 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 $168K-$227K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $176K across 1540 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 9,653 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 $212,000 based on 11,857 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $193,200. This role's midpoint ($198K) sits 7% below the category median. Disclosed range: $168K to $227K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($253,100) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $110,408; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $228,700; Director: $272,275; VP: $235,000.
General Dynamics Information Technology AI Hiring
General Dynamics Information Technology has 11 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across Data Scientist, AI/ML Engineer, AI Agent Developer, AI Software Engineer. Positions span Tampa, FL, US, Joint Base Lewis McChord, WA, US, Hurlburt Field, FL. Compensation range: $98K - $253K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 6% (568 positions) offer remote work, while 9,010 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,878 roles, $221,000 median); San Francisco (2,413 roles, $264,500 median); Los Angeles (1,340 roles, $210,000 median).
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 9,653 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 193 entry-level, 4,500 mid-level, 3,455 senior, and 1,505 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (568 positions). The remaining 9,010 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,400. Top-quartile compensation starts at $264,230. The 90th percentile reaches $319,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($253,100 median, 57 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 419 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 51 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 9,653 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (7,301), Data Scientist (441), AI Software Engineer (438). 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 (193) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,500) and senior (3,455) 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 1,505 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (568 positions), with 9,010 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 $213,400. Top-quartile roles start at $264,230, and the 90th percentile reaches $319,400. 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 $253,100 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 (1,605 postings), Aws (916 postings), Azure (724 postings), Rag (634 postings), Gcp (522 postings), Pytorch (495 postings), Kubernetes (384 postings), Claude (383 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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