Senior AI Technologist

Technical Analysis
We are seeking an experienced AI Technologist to drive the discovery, design, and adoption of enterprise AI capabilities across the organization. This is a greenfield opportunity to help build our enterprise AI program from the ground up by identifying high-value use cases, assessing AI readiness, and guiding the implementation of secure, scalable AI solutions. Working closely with business units, engineers, and functional teams, you will leverage applied AI technologies including large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI agents, and automation frameworks to solve real business challenges and improve operational efficiency. This role focuses on applying existing AI technologies to deliver business value rather than developing or training AI models. You will partner with technical teams to deploy AI solutions in highly regulated on-premises and cloud environments while ensuring alignment with security, governance, and enterprise architecture standards. Essential Functions: * Identify, evaluate, and prioritize opportunities to integrate AI into existing and new organizational processes and tooling. * Design and establish data structures, metadata models, naming conventions, and information architecture standards that enable scalable AI solutions. * Design AI solution approaches using existing technologies such as large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI agents, and orchestration frameworks to address business and operational challenges. * 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. * Define and support data preparation, ingestion, and retrieval workflows that enable production AI applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and AI agent solutions. * 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. * Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams. 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. Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities This employer is required to notify all applicants of their rights pursuant to federal employment laws. For further information, please review the Know Your Rights notice from the Department of Labor.