Senior Machine Learning Engineer

About This Role

Who We Are:

• CAE Vision: Our vision is to be the worldwide partner of choice in defense and security, and civil aviation by revolutionizing our customers' training and critical operations with digitally immersive solutions to elevate safety, efficiency and readiness.

• CAE Defense & Security Mission: CAE's Defense and Security business unit focuses on helping prepare military customers to develop and maintain the highest levels of mission readiness.

• CAE Values: Empowerment, Innovation, Excellence, Integrity and OneCAE make us who we are and we strive to make a difference in the world while helping each other succeed.

What We Have to Offer:

• Comprehensive and competitive benefits package and flexibility that promotes work-life balance

• A work environment where all employees are valued, respected and safe

• Freedom to succeed by enabling team members to deliver, take initiatives and make decisions

• Recognition, professional development, advancement and having fun!

Summary

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Machine Learning Engineer to join our growing AI & Data Science team in R&D. This role is ideal for someone passionate about solving complex problems using data-driven approaches and deploying scalable machine learning solutions in production environments. Additionally, this role will focus on designing scalable NLP systems powered by state-of-the-art transformer models, optimizing inference performance, and integrating LLMs into real-world products. You'll collaborate with cross-functional teams to deliver intelligent, language-driven solutions that enhance user experience and business outcomes. This position is onsite with locations in Tampa FL, Arlington TX, or Orlando FL.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models for real-world applications.

• Build scalable data pipelines and model training workflows using modern tools and frameworks.

• Conduct rigorous model evaluation, validation, and performance tuning.

• Monitor and maintain deployed models, ensuring reliability and accuracy over time.

• Design, fine-tune, and deploy LLMs (LLaMA, Mistral, etc.) for various NLP tasks such as summarization, question answering, semantic search, and chatbots.

• Develop scalable and efficient model serving infrastructure using tools like ONNX, TensorRT, DeepSpeed, or vLLM.

• Implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines using vector databases (e.g., FAISS, Weaviate, Pinecone, Milvus).

• Optimize LLM inference for latency, throughput, and cost across cloud and edge environments.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand business requirements and translate them into ML solutions.

• Stay current with the latest research and trends in machine learning, AI & LLMs.

• Mentor junior engineers and contribute to team knowledge sharing.

• Document processes, models, and decisions for transparency and reproducibility.

Qualifications and Education Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related field. PhD is a plus.

• 5+ years of software development experience, with at least 2 years focused on NLP or LLMs.

• Proficiency in ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit-learn, CUDA).

• Good understanding of distributed systems, understanding of microservice architecture and REST APIs.

• Strong understanding of MLOps tools and practices (MLflow, Airflow, DVC).

• Hands-on experience with Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, and OpenAI APIs.

• Technology proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), Linux, and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).

• Proven track record of deploying ML models in production environments.

• Experience in working with SQL/NoSQL database systems such as MySQL, MongoDB or Elasticsearch.

• Due to U.S. Government contract requirements, only U.S. citizens are eligible for this role.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with deep learning, NLP, computer vision, or reinforcement learning.

• Experience with feature engineering and model interpretability techniques.

• Knowledge of prompt engineering and prompt optimization strategies.

• Experience with multi-modal models (e.g., combining text with image or audio inputs).

• Familiarity with distributed training and model parallelism.

• Experience with fine-tuning LLMs using LoRA, QLoRA, or PEFT techniques is a plus.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and version control (Git).

• Ability to work in a fast-paced, agile development environment.

Security Responsibilities

Must complywith all company security and data protection / usage policies and procedures. Personally responsible for proper marking and handling of all information and materials, in any form. Shall not divulge any information, or afford access, to other employees not having a need-to-know. Shall not divulge information outside company without management approval. All government and proprietary information will be accessed and stored electronically on company provided resources.

• Incumbent must be eligible for DoD Personal Security Clearance.

Due to U.S. Government contract requirements, only U.S. citizens are eligible for this role.

Work Environment and Physical Demands

• Duties performed in an office environment and manufacturing facility.

• Must be able to work overtime on and off-shifts as required.

• May be required to sit down for long lengths of time.

• May be required to climb stairs.

Other Duties

Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for their job. Duties, responsibilities, and activities may change at any time with or without notice.

CAE USA Inc. is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to any protected characteristic, including disability and protected veteran status, as defined under federal, state, or local laws.

Applicants needing reasonable accommodations should contact their recruiter at any point in the recruitment process. If you need assistance to submit your application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at hrops@caemilusa.com

Position Type

CAE thanks all applicants for their interest. However, only those whose background and experience match the requirements of the role will be contacted.

CAE is an equal opportunity employer committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, national origin, age, religion, sex, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.At CAE, everyone is welcome to contribute to our success. Applicants needing reasonable accommodations should contact their recruiter at any point in the recruitment process. If you need assistance to submit your application because of incompatible assistive technology or a disability, please contact us at CAECarrieres-Careers@cae.com.