Senior AI and Large Language Model (LLM) Engineer - Black Canyon Consulting - Bethesda, MD
Black Canyon Consulting
LOCATION: Bethesda, Maryland (On-site / Not-remote)
Overview
We are seeking an experienced AI/LLM Engineer to lead the design, customization, and integration of large language models (LLMs) into biomedical research workflows and information retrieval systems. We are looking for someone with hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, augmenting, and deploying LLMs in production environments, ideally within biomedical or life sciences domains. The role is product-oriented and forward-looking, focused on building the next generation of AI-enabled search, retrieval, and knowledge discovery tools.
This role serves as a subject matter expert (SME) across multiple product and engineering teams. The selected candidate will help define, architect, and implement LLM-driven capabilities across a portfolio of NCBI services. The position requires strong technical depth, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to collaborate effectively within existing product and technical ecosystems.
This is a hands-on, build-oriented role with strategic influence. The candidate must be capable of guiding both what gets built and how it gets built.
Only serious candidates accepted - we are not seeking candidates that have recently graduated with a masters degree in the past 1-2 years.
We are seeking candidates with at least 3+ years experience doing this work after your last degree.
Key Responsibilities
Serve as the AI/LLM subject matter expert across product and engineering teams.
Collaborate with product managers and technical leads to define AI-enabled capabilities and define the use of LLMs across NCBI platforms (e.g., PubMed and related systems).
Develop and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems integrating LLMs with large-scale biomedical datasets.
Provide architectural guidance on model selection, domain adaptation, evaluation strategies, and deployment approaches.
Improve model grounding, factual accuracy, and scientific