AI Engineer

About the Company Armada is the hyperscaler for the edge, delivering modular AI infrastructure from first deployment to AI factory with speed, scale and sovereignty. Named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies and to the CNBC Disruptor 50, Armada’s solutions are deployed in over 60 countries globally for organizations ranging from energy to defense. With nearly $500 million in funding to date, Armada is backed by leading investors including Founders Fund, Lux, BlackRock and Microsoft (M12), alongside strategic partnerships with Microsoft, Dell, Palantir, NVIDIA, SpaceX, and Skydio. We are building the infrastructure layer for sovereign and edge AI - rugged, deployable compute for customers that cannot rely on centralized cloud. Working at Armada means taking ownership, driving autonomy, and delivering impact. You’ll tackle challenges that haven’t been solved before and help build something transformative from the ground up. What you do here will not only define your career but help further Armada’s mission to bridge the digital divide for customers around the world. About the role Armada is seeking exceptional AI Engineers to build and deploy intelligent systems at the edge of the physical world. You will develop production AI for offshore energy platforms, remote mines, defense installations, transportation networks, industrial facilities, autonomous systems, and distributed camera and sensor networks. These systems must operate reliably under real-world constraints, including intermittent connectivity, strict latency requirements, limited compute, noisy data, changing conditions, and rigorous security demands. Depending on your expertise, your work may span multimodal and generative AI, real-time computer vision, large language and vision-language models, robotics, reinforcement learning, statistical machine learning, time-series analysis, anomaly detection, or distributed AI inference. This role is intended for engineers with at least three years of relevant industry experience who have moved beyond experimentation, RAG implementation, and model prototyping. You will own substantial portions of the AI lifecycle, from problem definition and data preparation through model development, optimization, evaluation, deployment, observability, and continuous improvement in production. The strongest candidates combine rigorous ML and AI fundamentals with strong software-engineering judgment. They are equally comfortable interpreting research, implementing and evaluating new methods, diagnosing performance bottlenecks, and deploying resilient containerized AI services on GPUs across cloud, data-center, and disconnected edge environments. Location. This role is office-based at our Bellevue, Washington office. What You'll Do (Key Responsibilities) • Translate operational problems into AI requirements, datasets, evaluation criteria, and production architectures. • Design, train, fine-tune, and deploy models for vision, language, multimodal AI, time-series analysis, autonomy, and optimization. • Apply state-of-the-art research using fine-tuning, distillation, quantization, and hybrid AI approaches. • Build training and evaluation datasets from video, images, text, telemetry, sensor data, and synthetic data. • Evaluate models for accuracy, latency, throughput, robustness, safety, groundedness, and resource efficiency. • Optimize inference through quantization, pruning, distillation, batching, caching, and hardware-aware acceleration. • Build reliable AI services using Python, testing, versioning, observability, and automated deployment. • Deploy containerized AI workloads across Kubernetes, cloud, on-premises, and disconnected edge environments. • Build pipelines for model monitoring, data validation, drift detection, retraining, and controlled updates. • Partner with customers, product teams, engineers, and domain experts to move prototypes into production. • Diagnose issues across data pipelines, models, GPUs, orchestration, networking, and applications. • Contribute reusable models, datasets, evaluation tools, platform components, documentation, patents, and publications. Required Qualifications • Master’s or PhD in applied mathematics, computer science, computational science, engineering, or a related technical field. • 3+ years of industry experience in AI research, machine learning, and production software development. • Strong programming skills in Python and proficiency in Java, C++, or another production language. • Hands-on experience with statistical machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. • Strong understanding of supervised, unsupervised, transfer, and representation learning. • Experience with modern neural architectures, including transformers, convolutional networks, detection models, generative models, and autoencoders. • Proficiency with deep-learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, or JAX. • Familiarity with containers, numerical libraries, modular software design, version control, and automated testing. • Experience applying machine learning to real-world problems and deploying models beyond research prototypes. • Evidence of technical depth through peer-reviewed publications, open-source contributions, or significant production systems; publications at conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, CVPR, or ICCV are highly valued. Preferred Experience and Skills • Experience deploying production AI on GPUs, edge servers, embedded accelerators, robotics platforms, or distributed infrastructure. • Experience with TensorRT, Triton Inference Server, ONNX Runtime, vLLM, CUDA, or similar inference technologies. • Experience optimizing AI workloads for latency, throughput, memory, power, and real-time performance. • Experience with Kubernetes, microservices, distributed systems, CI/CD, and production MLOps. • Experience building multimodal systems using vision, language, audio, telemetry, geospatial, or sensor data. • Experience developing autonomous, robotic, industrial, defense, energy, transportation, or safety-critical systems. • Familiarity with quantization, pruning, distillation, LoRA, and other parameter-efficient optimization techniques. • Experience with synthetic data, active learning, weak supervision, human-in-the-loop workflows, or simulation. • Ability to make sound decisions under ambiguity and own systems from concept through production. Compensation For U.S. Based candidates: To ensure fairness and transparency, the starting base salary range for this role for candidates in the U.S. are listed below, varying based on location experience, skills, and qualifications. In addition to base salary, this role will also be offered equity and subsidized benefits (details available upon request). Benefits • Competitive base salary and equity • Medical, dental, and vision (subsidized cost) • Health savings accounts (HSA), flexible spending accounts (FSA), and dependent care FSAs (DCFSA) • Retirement plan options, including 401(k) and Roth 401(k) • Unlimited paid time off (PTO) • 14 paid company holidays per year #LI-SM2 #LI-Onsite Compensation $154,560—$193,200 USD You're a Great Fit if You're • A go-getter with a growth mindset. You're intellectually curious, have strong business acumen, and actively seek opportunities to build relevant skills and knowledge • A detail-oriented problem-solver. You can independently gather information, solve problems efficiently, and deliver results with a "get-it-done" attitude • Thrive in a fast-paced environment. You're energized by an entrepreneurial spirit, capable of working quickly, and excited to contribute to a growing company • A collaborative team player. You focus on business success and are motivated by team accomplishment vs personal agenda • Highly organized and results-driven. Strong prioritization skills and a dedicated work ethic are essential for you Equal Opportunity Statement At Armada, we are committed to fostering a work environment where everyone is given equal opportunities to thrive. As an equal opportunity employer, we strictly prohibit discrimination or harassment based on race, color, gender, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other characteristic protected by law. This policy applies to all employment decisions, including hiring, promotions, and compensation. Our hiring is guided by qualifications, merit, and the business needs at the time. Unsolicited Resumes and Candidates Armada does not accept unsolicited resumes or candidate submissions from external agencies or recruiters. All candidates must apply directly through our careers page. Any resumes submitted by agencies without a prior signed agreement will be considered unsolicited and Armada will not be obligated to pay any fees.