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About This Role
About Swingtech Swingtech delivers innovative Information Technology and Professional Support services to a diverse range of clients across the federal and intelligence communities. With over 15 years of trusted experience as a systems integrator, we apply agile methodologies and deep industry insight to help our customers achieve greater efficiency, compliance, and cost savings. At Swingtech, we’re committed to excellence and long-term success for our clients and our team. AI/ML Engineer (Mid)
Position Summary
The Mid-Level AI/ML Engineer is a hands-on technical contributor supporting the discovery, development, testing, deployment, and sustainment of DOL AI-enabled solutions. The position works closely with Senior AI/ML Engineers, data engineers, developers, business analysts, project managers, and DOL stakeholders to deliver secure, measurable, and maintainable AI capabilities.
Essential Duties
- Develop AI/ML-enabled applications, APIs, data-processing components, model integration layers, RAG pipelines, retrieval services, workflow automations, and technical prototypes.
- Support model development, fine-tuning, prompt/context engineering, evaluation, version control, release management, and production monitoring.
- Build RAG capabilities using approved document ingestion, parsing, metadata extraction, chunking, embeddings, vector indexing, hybrid retrieval, reranking, citation validation, and knowledge-base refresh processes.
- Implement agentic and workflow automation features, including approved MCP server or tool integrations, schema validation, controlled tool calls, audit logging, human-approval checkpoints, and safe failure handling.
- Develop robust code in Python, SQL, and other required languages using secure software-development practices.
- Create automated unit, integration, regression, data-quality, model-evaluation, and performance tests.
- Support AI evaluation for model accuracy, relevance, hallucination, grounding, bias/fairness, explainability, safety, security, and user acceptance.
- Participate in CI/CD, DevSecOps, MLOps, code-review, security-scanning, documentation, and source-control processes.
- Prepare technical documentation, runbooks, test evidence, release notes, model documentation, and configuration records.
- Support privacy, security, Responsible AI, accessibility, and ATO evidence-development activities.
- Support operational monitoring, incident response, defect triage, corrective actions, and knowledge transfer.
- Participate in agile ceremonies, demonstrations, backlog refinement, sprint planning, and retrospective improvement activities.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, software engineering, information systems, mathematics, statistics, or another relevant technical discipline.
- At least three years of overall relevant experience, including at least two years in AI/ML implementation, NLP, data science, generative AI, or AI-enabled software development.
- Experience with Python, SQL, REST APIs, Git, automated testing, and software-development practices.
- Experience or demonstrated proficiency with one or more of the following: ML frameworks, LLM APIs, RAG, embeddings, vector search, NLP, document intelligence, data pipelines, or model evaluation.
- Familiarity with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or comparable cloud-development environments.
- Ability to work effectively in a multidisciplinary agile team and communicate technical information clearly.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, Hugging Face, MLflow, vector databases, containerization, or Kubernetes.
- Familiarity with Federal cybersecurity, accessibility, privacy, Responsible AI, FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST, or ATO practices.
- Experience supporting Government, public-sector, health, benefits, grants, inspections, case management, document-processing, or knowledge-management systems.
Summary of Benefits* 15 PTO days
- 11 paid holidays
- Medical Insurance with – 3 options (HSA with $600 Employer Contribution).
- Dental Insurance with no age limit orthodonture.
- Vision Insurance through EyeMed in and out of network coverage.
- Short Term and Long-Term Disability coverage with 100% premium support,
- Life insurance and AD&D with 100% premium support
- Supplemental Life Insurance
- Critical Care and Accident Insurance availability
- Pet Insurance through Nationwide
- Employee Assistance Program
- 401k with enrollment from day one. 4% deferral by company.
- $1500 Annual Training Budget
- $1500 Referral bonus
- Eligibility for annual merit and discretionary bonus
- Flexible work arrangements
Equal Opportunity Employer Minority/Female/Veterans/Disabled
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 Swingtech Consulting Inc., 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.
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.
Swingtech Consulting Inc. AI Hiring
Swingtech Consulting Inc. has 3 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across Data Engineer, AI/ML Engineer. Based in Washington, DC, US.
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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