The Senior Artificial Intelligence Research Engineer at Vanderbilt University's Wicked Problems Laboratory is focused on advancing research and development in agentic AI frameworks, large-scale data systems, and AI-driven analytic tools for national security applications. The role addresses the challenge of designing and optimizing systems that integrate diverse APIs, large language models (LLMs), and data pipelines to support adaptive, mission-critical workflows in adversarial and evolving national security contexts.
Requirements
- 3–5+ years of hands-on AI engineering experience in enterprise, research, or critical-infrastructure environments.
- Direct experience training and tuning foundation models, including parameter-efficient techniques (LoRA, QLoRA, adapters), dataset construction, and evaluation across benchmarks.
- Practical expertise integrating LLMs with external tools and APIs, including retrieval systems, vector databases, function calling, or multi-agent orchestration.
- Expert-level Python proficiency, including designing and optimizing complex AI research pipelines, building high-performance training and inference systems, and developing secure, production-quality tooling in modern Python ecosystems (PyTorch, Hugging Face, Ray, vLLM).
- Strong software engineering capability, including implementing research-grade systems, experiment frameworks, structured logging, and reproducible workflows.
- Experience building secure data and model pipelines, including preprocessing, evaluation, and monitoring in sensitive or adversarial environments.
- Applied adversarial AI or threat-focused experience, such as red-teaming LLMs, vulnerability analysis, or evaluating model behavior under adversarial conditions.
Responsibilities
- Lead and support AI research activities, including training and tuning small- to medium-sized large language models and coordinating multi-agent AI systems to advance research objectives.
- Conduct AI-driven threat analysis to produce actionable security insights.
- Support the integration, evaluation, and testing of AI capabilities in laboratory and partner operational environments.
- Develop high-quality documentation—including system diagrams, test results, and sponsor deliverables—to support technology maturation and transition.
- Maintain expertise in emerging AI-driven threats, adversarial models, and advanced AI technologies to shape research direction.
- Collaborate with faculty, interdisciplinary teams, and external partners to support grant objectives, publications, prototypes, and demonstrations.
- Present technical insights through briefings, reports, and presentations to academic, industry, and operational audiences.
Other
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field is required.
- Master’s degree in related field is preferred.
- Support strategic relationships with government and industry partners while safeguarding research data, systems, and intellectual property.
- Eligibility for a U.S. security clearance is strongly preferred.
