Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer (Rockville)

Title: Lead AI Engineer — AI Compliance Location: Rockville, MD or Tysons, VA/Hybrid Duration: 12 Months Contract About the Role We are seeking a Lead AI Engineer to design and build an AI-powered compliance screening platform that evaluates communications for adherence to regulatory standards and industry guidelines. This is a high-impact role at the intersection of artificial intelligence, regulatory compliance, and risk management. You will lead the development of systems that analyze content across formats (PDFs, emails, social media, video) and generate auditable, explainable compliance decisions.

What You'll Do AI System Architecture Design and implement end-to-end pipelines for: Document ingestion (PDF, HTML, images, video/audio) Multimodal extraction (OCR, layout parsing, vision-language models) LLM-driven compliance reasoning Build scalable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems grounded in regulatory content Compliance Intelligence Translate regulatory frameworks into machine-interpretable logic Develop: Rule classifiers (e.g., performance claims, disclosures) Risk scoring models Violation detection workflows LLM & Model Strategy Evaluate LLMs that are specific for actions Implement: Prompt engineering and tool usage Fine-tuning strategies where appropriate Guardrails and hallucination mitigation techniques Integrate multimodal models for charts, images, and disclosures Explainability & Auditability Build systems that generate: Clear, regulator-ready explanations Evidence-backed decisions (text spans linked to rules) Ensure full audit trails for all AI-driven outputs Expert-level understanding of LLM evaluation frameworks (deepeval preferred) Evaluation & Risk Management Define and track key metrics (precision, recall, false negatives) Implement human-in-the-loop review workflows Conduct adversarial and edge-case testing Continuously improve model performance and reliability Technical Leadership Establish best practices for architecture, coding, and MLOps Collaborate cross-functionally with compliance, legal, and product teams Mentor a team of engineers on best AI/ML practices Qualifications Education Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field PhD preferred but not required Experience 8+ years of experience in software engineering or machine learning Proven track record of building and deploying production AI/ML systems Experience in regulated industries (finance, legal, healthcare) strongly preferred Technical Skills AI / Machine Learning Strong expertise in: NLP and large language models (LLMs) Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) Model evaluation and benchmarking Familiarity with multimodal AI (text + image + layout) Tools & Frameworks Python ecosystem Experience with LLM orchestration or agent frameworks such as: LangChain, AWS Strands Vector databases (e.g., PG Vector, Pinecone) Document processing pipelines (OCR, PDF parsing tools) Systems & Infrastructure Cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) MLOps, CI/CD pipelines, and model monitoring Scalable system design and distributed architectures Compliance & Risk Awareness (Highly Desired) Experience with explainable AI (XAI) Understanding of auditability and governance requirements Exposure to industry regulations and compliance frameworks is a strong plus Preferred Qualifications Experience building legal or compliance-focused AI systems Familiarity with marketing/advertising review processes Experience analyzing structured and unstructured documents (including charts and disclosures) Background in hybrid AI systems (rules + machine learning)