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Engineering Manager for Federal AI/ML Systems
Mission
Lead teams across contractor boundaries to deliver dependable systems from concept through operations. Apply deep systems engineering judgment and appropriate AI, machine learning, and agent techniques to improve engineering work and mission outcomes within agreed scope, schedule, cost, and NASA assurance requirements.
Responsibilities
Manage relationships with government stakeholders and prime contractors. Clarify needs, communicate progress and tradeoffs, resolve disagreements, and route scope or funding changes through the agreed contractual channels.
Lead an integrated team across employers. Establish priorities, work assignments, interfaces, and quality expectations within delegated authority; coach contributors and resolve conflicts. Define staffing needs, interview candidates, and coordinate selection, onboarding, and performance feedback with each person’s employer.
Own the team’s delivery plan, staffing, estimates, cost forecasts, dependencies, and risk register. Escalate problems as needed with realistic options and documented decisions.
Lead stakeholder needs analysis, concepts of operations, requirements, architecture, trade studies, implementation, integration, verification, validation, deployment, operations, and sustainment. Use prototypes to resolve uncertainty and evolve successful designs into reliable operational systems.
Identify, select, and combine conventional software, rules, planning, optimization, statistical learning, and generative models using evidence and explicit tradeoffs. Design agents with bounded authority, durable state, and testable behavior; apply them to engineering workflows and operational capabilities where justified.
Provide technical guidance for model hosting and proxies, MCP servers, agent integrations, and cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Review designs and code, build focused prototypes, and help resolve difficult failures.
Define and verify safeguards for data access, tool execution, human approvals, model use, and spending. Establish evaluation criteria, release controls, monitoring, incident response, and recovery practices.
Apply relevant NASA engineering procedures and project requirements. Ensure traceability, configuration control, review readiness, verification evidence, and timely resolution of assurance findings.
Required Qualifications
Demonstrated leadership of multidisciplinary teams across organizational boundaries; successful federal delivery as a subcontractor; substantial NASA systems engineering experience; and evidence of carrying systems into operations. Require broad AI/ML judgment and recent hands-on software and hybrid cloud infrastructure work.
Pay & Benefits
Salary is part of an overall compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity for you to grow and develop within a role.
The salary range for this role is between $130,000 and $200,000, and your salary will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience and location.
You will also receive benefits including: Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with a health savings account, a 401k retirement plan with company match, and company paid life and disability insurance. We also offer permissive leave and holidays.
RA231 is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics.