AI/ML Modeling Lead

Key Responsibilities

• Team Leadership & Execution: Lead day-to-day modeling team delivery, driving task prioritization, sprint planning, peer reviews, and cross-functional coordination.
• Requirements Translation: Translate complex mission objectives, operational challenges, and stakeholder inputs into defined modeling requirements, assumptions, and acceptance criteria.
• Technical Architecture & Guidance: Provide architectural direction on modeling techniques, feature engineering, data inputs, validation protocols, and performance tradeoffs to ensure solutions are reliable, explainable, and fit-for-purpose.
• Quality & Governance: Review modeling pipelines, system documentation, and analytical products for quality, consistency, and compliance with enterprise data governance standards.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with data engineers, software developers, product owners, and USAF stakeholders to integrate models into scalable production pipelines within enterprise platforms.
• Risk & Blocker Mitigation: Proactively identify technical dependencies, resource bottlenecks, and delivery risks, providing actionable mitigation paths to program leadership.
• Mentorship & Best Practices: Mentor data scientists and analysts by sharing engineering best practices, establishing repeatable modeling frameworks, and championing disciplined version control and documentation habits.

Required Experience/Clearance

• Security Clearance: Active DoD Secret clearance. Applicants must currently possess an active Secret clearance to be considered. Candidates without an active clearance will not be considered.
• Professional Experience: 6+ years of progressive experience in data science, advanced analytics, or machine learning, including experience leading technical projects or multidisciplinary teams.
• Data Strategy & Execution: Demonstrated track record of leveraging data products to drive operational strategies and high-impact business outcomes.
• Agile Leadership: Proven experience managing technical workflows within collaborative, agile development environments (e.g., Scrum, Kanban).
• Stakeholder Communication: Exceptional ability to articulate complex AI/ML methodologies, validation results, and technical concepts to non-technical operational leaders.
• Platform & Tool Familiarity: Solid working knowledge of modern data platforms, cloud architectures, and analytics visualization tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau).
• Education: Master’s degree in a quantitative discipline (Data Science, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Business Analytics) or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Skills/Education

We encourage all candidates who meet the basic requirements to apply, even if you do not have any of the following experience:

• Advana / WDP / BLADE: Direct experience working within the CDAO War Data Platform (WDP / Advana) or the USAF BLADE analytics enclave.
• Defense Logistics & CBM+: Domain knowledge of Department of Defense maintenance operations, supply chain logistics, aviation telemetry, or Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM+).
• End-to-End Lifecycle Modeling: Hands-on experience executing full-lifecycle modeling workflows, including data cleaning, model design, validation, calibration, hyperparameter tuning, and production documentation.
• Data Quality Frameworks: In-depth understanding of enterprise data governance, data lineage, and automated data quality validation.
• Industry Certifications: Relevant technical or management credentials such as Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), or cloud/data architecture certifications.