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About This Role
Company Description
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Govini transforms Defense Acquisition from an outdated manual process to a software\-driven strategic advantage for the United States. Our flagship product, Ark, supports Supply Chain, Science \& Technology, Production, Sustainment, Logistics, and Modernization teams with AI\-enabled Applications and best\-in\-class data to more rapidly imagine, develop, and field the capabilities we need. Today, the national security community and every branch of the military rely on Govini to enable faster and more informed Acquisition decisions.
Job Description
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We are seeking an experienced AI Engineer to join our Agentic AI team as we scale our agentic offerings across all levels of the US government. Over the past year, we have seen the rapid adoption of our agent, Ace. We expect Ace to be handling much more complex tasks and workflows end\-to\-end or in cooperation with a human user as time goes on. The team is striving to make Ace an even more effective agent, focusing on planning, reliable execution over longer time horizon tasks, scaled tool use, Ace Skills, memory, and inter\-agent coordination.
In order to do this job well, we are looking for someone who can demonstrate a project built on LLMs that showcases your skill at getting them to do complex tasks.
- Experience integrating and working with LLMs, with a strong understanding of their capabilities and limitations
- Experience integrating and working with agent frameworks like Claude Agent SDK or OpenAI Agent SDK
- Experience building observability, evaluation, and feedback loops for agent behavior (telemetry, prompt evaluation, regression testing, and reliability metrics).
- Experience working in highly ambiguous environments, and operate with urgency
- Startup experience, particularly in scaling products from zero to one
Strong Candidates have:
- Experience designing and deploying complex agentic systems using LLMs
- Hands\-on work with multi\-agent coordination, routing, and tool orchestration
- Love coding agents
This role is a full\-time position located out of our office in Pittsburgh, PA.
This role may require up to 25% travel
### Scope of Responsibilities
- Designs and builds multi\-agent systems with tool use, memory, routing, and planning
- Develops Agent Skills and tools as modular, composable services that interact with backend systems, models, and data processing
- Own the technical architecture and engineering standards for agentic systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability
- Assist with automated evaluation of agents, skills, and prompts across the entire product lifecycle
- Work with our Product and Implementation organizations to find solutions to our most vexing challenges, applying agents to our customer problems
### Qualifications
- U.S. Citizenship is required
Required Skills:
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Doctorate in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a related field
- Minimum 1 year of experience building and deploying ML or LLM\-powered systems in production environments
- Practical experience in building, developing, and productionizing machine learning systems
- Advanced software skills in Python
- Experience with common LLM algorithms and implementations
- Hands\-on experience with AWS and cloud infrastructure
- A strong desire to learn and investigate new technologies
- Familiarity with Git source control management
- Ability to work collaboratively with little supervision
- A burning desire to work in a challenging, fast\-paced tech environment
Desired Skills:
- Current possession of a U.S. security clearance, or the ability to obtain one with our sponsorship
- Experience in or exposure to the nuances of a startup or other entrepreneurial environment
- Comfortable with Claude Code and GenAI coding best practices.
We firmly believe that past performance is the best indicator of future performance. If you thrive while building solutions to complex problems, are a self\-starter, and are passionate about making an impact in global security, we're eager to hear from you.
Govini is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability and protected veterans status or any other characteristic protected by law.
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 3,823 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 69% of the market. At Govini, 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 $181,170 based on 12,692 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $165,000.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($275,000) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $97,880; Mid: $165,000; Senior: $227,400; Director: $247,800; VP: $250,000.
Govini AI Hiring
Govini has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Pittsburgh, PA, US.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 15% (590 positions) offer remote work, while 3,217 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (2,643 roles, $211,000 median); San Francisco (2,168 roles, $253,000 median); Los Angeles (1,792 roles, $191,580 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 3,823 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 112 entry-level, 1,798 mid-level, 1,516 senior, and 397 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 15% of the market (590 positions). The remaining 3,217 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $200,100. Top-quartile compensation starts at $253,500. The 90th percentile reaches $307,500. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($275,000 median, 41 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 55 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 434 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 3,823 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (2,629), Data Scientist (322), AI Software Engineer (279). 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 (112) are outnumbered by mid-level (1,798) and senior (1,516) 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 397 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 15% of all AI roles (590 positions), with 3,217 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 $200,100. Top-quartile roles start at $253,500, and the 90th percentile reaches $307,500. 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 Engineering Manager roles lead at $275,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $140,000. 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 (1,979 postings), Aws (1,190 postings), Azure (899 postings), Rag (839 postings), Gcp (726 postings), Pytorch (595 postings), Prompt Engineering (595 postings), Claude (540 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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