Senior LLM / RAG Engineer

Overview

We are looking for a SeniorLevel Engineer to lead the development and sustainment of RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG) AI prototypes for a nationalsecurity mission. You will work directly with customer stakeholders to expand an existing prototype and deliver new LLMpowered capabilities that help analysts understand and act on large volumes of proprietary data. In this role, you will combine data engineering, model serving, GPUbased inference, and rapid application development to deliver highimpact AI tools in a secure environment.

Key Responsibilities

Maintain and extend current RAG prototypes to integrate new datasets and features
* Build and optimize data ingest pipelines using Python and AWS services
* Develop LLM/embedding pipelines and operate GPU inference workloads
* Deploy and manage containerized services in Kuberneteslike or Dockerbased environments
* Implement vector search solutions using modern vector databases
* Develop missionfocused UIs using Streamlit or similar tools for rapid prototyping
* Use tools such as sglang, Ray Serve, and LlamaIndex to operationalize LLM capabilities
* Collaborate closely with analysts and mission leaders to understand use cases and rapidly iterate on prototypes
* Ensure solutions follow customer security, compliance, and operational guidelines
* Write technical documentation for deployments, APIs, and system behaviors

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in an area relevant to the position with 12+ years of applicable experience OR a Master's degree in an area relevant to the position with 10 years of applicable experience; an additional 4 years of applicable experience maybe considered in lieu of a degree.
• Active TS/SCI or SCI eligibility and active polygraph or ability to obtain a polygraph
• Strong handson experience with AWS services (EC2, S3, IAM, container services)
• Expertise with Python and Linux in operational environments
• Ability to design, deploy, and manage Dockerbased workloads
• Experience with GPU inference, model serving, and LLM fundamentals
• Experience working with structured, semistructured, and unstructured data
• Familiarity with CI/CD basics (Git, Jenkins, etc.)

Preferred Skills

• Streamlit or similar tools for rapid UI development
• Experience with vector stores (Milvus or comparable)
• Familiarity with embedding generation and RAG pipeline tooling
• Experience with sglang, Ray Serve, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face, or similar frameworks
• AWS certifications
• Knowledge of prompt engineering and evaluation best practices

Peraton offers enhanced benefits to employees working on this critical National Security program, which include heavily subsidized employee benefits coverage for you and your dependents, 25 days of PTO accrued annually up to a generous PTO cap and eligible to participate in an attractive bonus plan.

Peraton is a next-generation national security company that drives missions of consequence spanning the globe and extending to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. As the world's leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted, highly differentiated solutions and technologies to protect our nation and allies. Peraton operates at the critical nexus between traditional and nontraditional threats across all domains: land, sea, space, air, and cyberspace. The company serves as a valued partner to essential government agencies and supports every branch of the U.S. armed forces. Each day, our employees do the can't be done by solving the most daunting challenges facing our customers. Visit peraton.com to learn how we're keeping people around the world safe and secure.