Company Overview
At 4A Consulting, we turn complexity into opportunity. Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Baltimore, MD, we are a women-owned, boutique consulting firm specializing in delivering innovative, data-driven solutions to both the Federal Government and Fortune 500 clients. Our team blends deep industry knowledge with advanced technologies to design tailored strategies that drive measurable and sustainable outcomes. We pride ourselves on an agile, collaborative approach that helps organizations navigate challenges and seize emerging opportunities in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. At 4A, we don t just deliver projects, we build trusted partnerships that empower our clients to lead with confidence in the digital age.
Position Overview
The Senior AI/ML Platform Engineer will design, implement, operate, and continuously improve the state's shared enterprise AI/ML platform. The role focuses on platform automation, MLOps, CI/CD, cloud infrastructure, observability, reliability engineering, and cost optimization. The engineer will own critical platform components end-to-end, improve developer productivity and deployment efficiency, establish engineering standards, and mentor other engineers while enabling secure, reliable, and scalable AI/ML services across multiple state agencies.
Work Location: This role is expected to be onsite at Linthicum, MD. Some teleworking may be permitted based on assignment and team needs.
Interview: An in-person interview may be required.
Key Responsibilities
- Pipeline Automation and CI/CD: Design and maintain enterprise-grade ML CI/CD pipelines for automated model validation, testing, A/B testing, canary deployments, rollback, and production releases. Implement GitOps practices and improve model-to-production delivery times.
- Observability and Reliability: Establish monitoring, alerting, and service-level objectives (SLOs) for platform services and deployed models. Implement model monitoring for data drift, concept drift, and performance degradation. Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and corrective actions.
- Cloud Cost Optimization: Monitor cloud expenditure, identify resource inefficiencies, and optimize GPU/CPU utilization, autoscaling, workload scheduling, and infrastructure sizing. Evaluate platform components based on performance and total cost of ownership.
- Developer Experience and Self-Service: Develop internal SDKs, CLI tools, reusable templates, APIs, and standardized deployment workflows. Maintain API versioning, backward compatibility, documentation, runbooks, architecture decision records (ADRs), and onboarding guides.
- Platform Engineering and Operations: Own the architecture, implementation, maintenance, and production support of core platform components. Ensure scalability, availability, security, maintainability, and operational efficiency.
- Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Conduct code and design reviews, mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, participate in architecture reviews and technical evaluations, and collaborate with agency teams and platform leadership.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business, or another related scientific or technical discipline. A master's degree is preferred.
- At least ten (10) years of experience in platform engineering, MLOps, or data/software engineering, including at least two (2) years working with production ML systems.
- Strong proficiency in Python and experience developing and maintaining reliable, production-grade software.
- Demonstrated experience designing and improving ML CI/CD pipelines, automation frameworks, and deployment processes.
- Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, including cloud resource management and cost optimization.
- Advanced experience with Kubernetes, including cluster management, resource quotas, autoscaling, and workload scheduling.
- Hands-on experience with observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, and OpenTelemetry, or equivalent technologies.
- Production-scale experience with Terraform and Ansible for infrastructure automation and configuration management.
- Strong understanding of the ML lifecycle, including experiment tracking, model registries, feature stores, model serving, and drift monitoring.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in state government, the public sector, or highly regulated environments.
- Familiarity with FedRAMP, NIST AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF), and applicable cybersecurity and privacy requirements, including CJIS, HIPAA, IRS Publication 1075, and PII protection, where applicable.
- Experience with responsible AI, model explainability, fairness auditing, bias mitigation, and model risk management.
- Knowledge of platform observability, reliability engineering, incident management, disaster recovery, and cloud cost optimization.
- Strong technical leadership, mentoring, documentation, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to executive and nontechnical stakeholders.
Skills and Competencies
- Systems ownership: Takes end-to-end responsibility for platform reliability and operational outcomes.
- Quantitative problem-solving: Measures improvements in latency, cloud cost, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and developer onboarding time.
- Technical communication: Produces clear architecture documents, technical specifications, runbooks, and incident reports.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Communicates technical trade-offs effectively with engineers, agency stakeholders, and leadership.
- Mentorship: Supports engineering development through code reviews, knowledge sharing, and collaborative problem-solving.
Why Join 4A
- Be part of a mission-driven, women-owned consulting firm with a reputation for excellence.
- Work on high-impact projects across federal and commercial clients.
- Collaborate in an inclusive, growth-oriented culture where innovation is valued.
- Access career development programs, mentorship, and learning opportunities.
- Enjoy a comprehensive benefits package, flexible work options, and a focus on work-life balance.
Equal Opportunity Statement
4A Consulting is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to an inclusive hiring process. Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability may contact . This email is intended solely for accommodation requests.
Please note that 4A Consulting participates in the federal E-Verify program. Upon hire, we will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you are authorized to work in the US. 4A Consulting will only use E-Verify once you have accepted a job offer and completed the Form I-9.
