Senior Data Scientist

Barbaricum is a rapidly growing government contractor providing leading-edge support to federal customers, with a particular focus on Defense and National Security mission sets. We leverage more than 15 years of support to stakeholders across the federal government, with established and growing capabilities across Intelligence, Analytics, Engineering, Mission Support, and Communications disciplines. Founded in 2008, our mission is to transform the way our customers approach constantly changing and complex problem sets by bringing to bear the latest in technology and the highest caliber of talent.   Headquartered in Washington, DC's historic Dupont Circle neighborhood, Barbaricum also has a corporate presence in Tampa, FL, Bedford, IN, and Dayton, OH, with team members across the United States and around the world. As a leader in our space, we partner with firms in the private sector, academic institutions, and industry associations with a goal of continually building our expertise and capabilities for the benefit of our employees and the customers we support. Through all of this, we have built a vibrant corporate culture diverse in expertise and perspectives with a focus on collaboration and innovation. Our teams are at the frontier of the Nation's most complex and rewarding challenges. Join us.  
Barbaricum is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to support the Department of Defense’s Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) in accelerating the DoD’s adoption of data, analytics, and AI. The Search Portfolio serves the fundamental need to accelerate decision advantage through information accessibility, information retrieval and insight extraction. The Portfolio will sustain the GAMECHANGER, Contract Search, and JBook Search applications on the Advana platform as the platform upgrades and evolves. This role will be essential for the program and mission as it delivers specialized AI and machine learning capabilities crucial for handling, analyzing, and optimizing large and complex datasets, which are integral to defense and intelligence functions.

Responsibilities

• Designs, configures, develops, tests, and supports informatics and data science solutions for a wide array of technical use cases.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data scientists and software engineers to integrate AI solutions developed by other elements of CDAO or the DoD community into Search Portfolio products when appropriate.
• Optimize AI models for performance, scalability, and efficiency, leveraging cloud-based resources and distributed computing frameworks, specifically Apache Spark/Databricks. Ability to adapt code base to also run using GPU enabled Kubernetes clusters.
• Stay updated on and contribute to the latest advancements in AI research, applying new findings to improve Search Portfolio products.
• Manage the lifecycle of AI/ML components used in Search Portfolio products from research and development to deployment and optimization.
• Applies analytical methodologies to diagnose data-related challenges, implement solutions, and evaluate performance;
• Documents and presents requirements, design alternatives, and findings to team members and clients.
• Ability to develop strategic, baselined, data modeling processes; ability to accurately determine cause-and-effect relationships; and experience with integrated development environments, data integration, data visualization, data mining, and analysis tools.
• Maintains and guides the development of common libraries and tools used by multiple teams.
• Aids in formulating a strategy on how to achieve rapid prototyping.

Qualifications

• Must have an active DoD Top Secret clearance and must be able to achieve a TS/SCI clearance with scope.
• Bachelor’s degree plus 7-10 years experience, or a Masters Degree plus 5 years of experience.
• Experience with ML fields, e.g., natural language processing, computer vision, statistical learning theory.
• Hands-on experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models, text embedding, semantic query, use of generative AI for text, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
• Familiarity with data preprocessing, feature engineering, and model evaluation techniques essential for machine learning projects.
• Strong understanding of various machine learning algorithms, including supervised and unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and neural networks.
• Experience with version control systems like Git, enabling effective collaboration and code management.
• Experience in an ML engineer or data scientist role building ML models.
• Experience writing code in Python, R, Scala, Java, C++ with documentation for reproducibility.
• Experience using Apache Spark/Databricks distributed compute environments for AI/ML workloads.
• Experience handling petabyte size datasets, diving into data to discover hidden patterns, using data visualization tools, writing SQL, and working with GPUs to develop models.
• Experience with cloud-based data persistence products, especially RDS PostgreSQL and PostgreSQL extensions such as pgvector.
• Experience writing and speaking about technical concepts to business, technical, and lay audiences and giving data-driven presentations.

Additional Information
For more information about Barbaricum, please visit our website at www.barbaricum.com.  We will contact candidates directly to schedule interviews.  No phone calls please.