AI Engineer - WFH

About the Company

ICF is a global advisory and technology services provider that helps clients address complex challenges through specialized expertise, technology, and consulting services. Its Digital Modernization Division delivers strategic information technology and management consulting solutions to federal clients, with a focus on cloud, cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, data modernization, and digital transformation.

About the Role

ICF is seeking an AI Engineer to support the modernization of a large federal agency’s enterprise data and analytics ecosystem. This remote position focuses on developing and operationalizing artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and generative AI solutions that support data-driven decision-making across the enterprise.

The AI Engineer will build reusable AI/ML solutions, deployment frameworks, prompt orchestration patterns, agentic workflows, and MLOps pipelines using technologies such as Python, Databricks ML, Azure Machine Learning, and MLflow. The role also involves working with engineering, security, governance, and business teams to ensure AI solutions are reliable, monitored, cost-effective, and aligned with responsible AI practices.

This position is contingent upon a contract award. ICF is conducting interviews and extending offers in anticipation of the award. The role is remote, with a strong preference for candidates in the Washington, DC metropolitan area who can attend occasional onsite meetings in Washington, DC.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop NLP, text analytics, prompt orchestration, guardrails, content filtering, and human-in-the-loop workflows using approved AI/ML tools and data environments.
• Translate unstructured-data use cases into repeatable technical solutions that address privacy, data provenance, evaluation, monitoring, and operational integration.
• Apply large language model and generative AI patterns, retrieval and evaluation techniques, Azure AI capabilities, and prompt orchestration to support business and technical requirements.
• Collaborate with Trustworthy AI, Security, Data Governance, Customer Experience, and other stakeholders to ensure AI capabilities are safe, useful, and appropriately governed.
• Build and maintain reusable AI/ML solutions, model deployment frameworks, agentic workflows, and MLOps pipelines.
• Develop model evaluation and monitoring approaches to assess performance, reliability, and production readiness.
• Support human review processes and responsible AI controls for enterprise AI applications.
• Integrate AI solutions with cloud-based data pipelines, analytics platforms, APIs, and operational applications.
• Contribute to performance optimization, scalability, reliability, and cloud cost management for AI/ML workloads.
• Document technical work, decisions, risks, and delivery evidence to support traceability and continuous improvement.
• Work with engineering, architecture, product, quality, governance, and business teams in cross-functional delivery environments.

Required Qualifications

• U.S. citizenship is required due to federal contract requirements.
• Must reside in the United States, be authorized to work in the United States, and perform all work within the United States.
• Must have lived in the United States for three full years out of the last five years.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• A master’s degree may substitute for two years of relevant experience.
• Six or more years of experience designing, developing, and deploying AI/ML solutions in enterprise cloud environments.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to work with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong organizational skills, attention to detail, and the ability to prioritize multiple responsibilities.

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, generative AI, NLP, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), semantic search, vector databases, and prompt engineering.
• Experience developing AI applications and agentic workflows using Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI, Databricks AI/ML, MLflow, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or similar frameworks.
• Experience building prompt orchestration, evaluation frameworks, model testing strategie…