Team Lead, AI and Advanced Analytics (Public Sector)
Location: Utah state
Type: FTE
Pay: DoE Expected start: mid-November 2026
About the role
NexXora is putting together a team to deliver AI and advanced-analytics services to a US state government audit office over two years. We're looking for a senior hands-on leader to be the named Team Lead. You'll be the client's main technical contact and the person accountable for results.
The work matters. You'll help public auditors find risk, waste and fraud in large government datasets, use AI safely on sensitive information, and leave the client's own staff more capable when the engagement ends.
What you'll do
- Find risk, anomalies and fraud in large datasets (core of the role)
- Design and lead analytics on large, messy public-sector datasets (e.g., spending, payments, payroll, grants, contracts, benefits) to flag risks, anomalies, fraud indicators and areas worth auditing.
- Use and explain a range of methods: rules and red-flag testing, statistical outlier detection, unsupervised anomaly detection, network and relationship analysis, record matching across datasets, and supervised models where labeled cases exist.
- Turn findings into evidence auditors can act on, with clear reasoning, documented methods, and results someone else can reproduce.
- AI-powered reference review
- Build and run tools that check audit reports against their source documents: citations, numbers and factual statements.
- Design for accuracy: the AI flags issues for a human to decide. Track error rates and keep an audit trail.
- Secure, on-premises AI
- Choose, deploy, customize and evaluate open-source AI models (LLMs) on the client's own infrastructure, so sensitive data never leaves their environment.
- Apply them to qualitative analysis: interview notes, survey comments, organizational-culture assessments and other sensitive audit work.
- Set up the access controls, logging, data-handling rules and model-evaluation practices that a government audit office needs.
- Build the client's own AI capability
- Design and deliver training for audit staff, from AI basics to advanced practitioner skills, including guidance on certifications and further education.
- Design and run an AI fellowship program that develops lasting in-house expertise.
- Mentor client analysts and leave behind documentation, playbooks and reusable tools.
- Lead the team and the relationship
- Lead a multidisciplinary NexXora team (data scientists, engineers, analysts) and keep work on time and on budget.
- Act as the primary contact for the client's leadership. Explain technical work in plain language, set priorities, and report progress.
- Represent NexXora in client interviews and presentations, including during the selection process.
What you bring (required)
- Master's degree or PhD in data analytics, artificial intelligence or machine learning, computer science, statistics, data science, or a closely related quantitative field.
- 7+ years of hands-on analytics or data-science experience, including 3+ years leading teams that delivered projects on time and on budget.
- Proven experience detecting fraud, risk or anomalies in large, complex datasets, with at least one project you can describe in detail.
- Experience adapting AI or machine-learning models to the specific needs of an organization.
- A track record of building capability in others through training, mentoring or knowledge transfer.
- Strong plain-language communication with non-technical leaders and auditors.
- Fluency in Python and SQL, and experience with large-data tools (e.g., Spark, DuckDB or a cloud data warehouse).
- US work authorization without sponsorship. Able to pass a background check. Able to travel to the client site about monthly.
Nice to have
- Experience with government, audit, inspector-general, legislative or other public-sector clients, especially with confidential data.
- Has deployed open-source LLMs on an organization's own servers (e.g., vLLM, Ollama, llama.cpp), including fine-tuning or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
- Has built AI systems that check documents against sources or verify claims, with measured accuracy.
- Qualitative or text analytics on surveys, interviews or culture assessments.
- Audit, forensic or investigative credentials (CPA, CFE, CIA, CISA), or cloud or security certifications.
- Teaching, curriculum design, published research, or conference speaking.
