Sr. Engineer, Generative & Agentic AI

Babel Street is the trusted technology partner for the world’s most advanced identity intelligence and risk operations. We deliver advanced AI and data analytics solutions providing unmatched, analysis-ready data regardless of language, proactive risk identification, 360-degree insights, high-speed automation, and seamless integration into existing systems. Babel Street empowers government and commercial organizations to transform high-stakes identity and risk operations into a strategic advantage.  The actionable insights we deliver safeguard lives and protect critical assets around the world.  Babel Street is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, with regional offices in Boston, MA and Cleveland, OH, and international offices in Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, and the U.K. For more information, visit www.babelstreet.com. 

ROLE SUMMARY 

As Senior Director of Generative & Agentic AI, you will play a central role in Babel Street’s transformation into an AI-native risk intelligence organization. You will architect, operationalize, and scale generative and agentic AI capabilities across the Babel Street platform, ensuring they are mission-ready, safe, economically efficient, and deeply integrated with our products and data ecosystem. 

You will work closely with the President & Chief AI Officer, as well as Product and Engineering leadership to execute the company’s AI strategy—balancing innovation with rigor, speed with safety, and capability with cost discipline. This role requires strong technical depth, hands-on experience, architectural judgment, and the ability to translate rapidly evolving AI technologies into reliable, customer-facing intelligence capabilities. You will lead teams building multilingual and multi-modal LLM and SLM pipelines, retrieval, agent-driven workflow systems, and graph-integrated reasoning capabilities that directly support intelligence applications—powering investigative, analytical, and operational workflows across Babel Street’s product suite. 

You will focus on capabilities that automate analysis, reduce cognitive load, and power Babel Street’s future Knowledge Graph. A defining aspect of this role is ensuring all AI capabilities are delivered with strong guardrails, low hallucination rates, transparent behavior, and a relentless focus on winning on AI economics. 

This is a hybrid role to be based out of either our Reston, VA or Somerville MA office.

ROLE SPAN 

This role spans three integrated domains: 

Generative AI & LLM/SLM Platform  

You will help define and execute Babel Street’s generative AI strategy, establishing clear frameworks for when to deploy multilingual and multi-modal LLMs versus SLMs and when to apply RAG versus fine-tuning to maximize accuracy, explainability, and mission impact. You will shape tooling and vendor decisions, lead model-provider partnerships, and architect scalable multilingual inference pipelines optimized through quantization, caching, routing, and GPU efficiency to ensure we consistently win on AI economics. You will integrate embeddings and retrieval systems, develop evaluation and red-teaming pipelines, and ensure all generative capabilities meet mission-grade requirements for reliability, transparency, cost efficiency, and global language coverage. 

Agentic AI & Workflow Automation  

You will design and implement agent architectures that deliver mission-aligned automation directly to customers—accelerating investigations, reducing cognitive load, and enabling intelligence applications and cross-product task execution through LLM- and agent-powered Knowledge Graph intelligence. In parallel, you will collaborate with Engineering teams to introduce agentic capabilities that improve engineering velocity, automate internal workflows, enhance data quality, and streamline operations. You will operationalize agentic SDLC practices, build evaluation and guardrail systems, and establish observability frameworks to ensure reliable, secure, and transparent agent behavior, with a strong emphasis on cost-efficient execution and orchestration. 

AI Integration & Safe, Secure Delivery 

You will collaborate with Product and Engineering to embed AI-native practices into the product suite and support the integration of AI capabilities into user-facing workflows. In this role, you will help productionize AI features through governance, telemetry, automated evaluation, adversarial testing, and responsible AI frameworks. You will contribute to the design and implementation of safeguards, guardrails, and hallucination-mitigation techniques, and support controls that monitor drift, enforce safe model behavior, and maintain transparency across the AI lifecycle—ensuring AI capabilities are measurable, trustworthy, and aligned with emerging regulatory expectations. 

Across all domains, you will help build a high-performing AI organization and foster a culture defined by velocity, craftsmanship, safety, experimentation, and outcome-driven execution. 

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES 

Generative AI & LLM/SLM Platform

• Execute the generative AI strategy, including LLM vs. SLM and RAG vs. fine-tuning decision frameworks.
• Architect scalable, multilingual inference pipelines optimized for performance, reliability, and AI economics.
• Lead model tooling selection and partnerships across proprietary and open-weight ecosystems.

Agentic AI & Workflow Automation

• Design agent architectures that automate investigations and cross-platform analytical workflows.
• Build agentic systems that leverage the Knowledge Graph for reasoning, task planning, and orchestration.
• Introduce agentic capabilities that improve internal engineering and operational workflows. 

AI Integration & Safe, Secure Delivery

• Support Product and Engineering teams in embedding AI capabilities into customer workflows.
• Contribute to AI productization through governance, telemetry, automated testing, and adversarial evaluation.
• Help design and implement safeguards, guardrails, and drift-monitoring controls. 

Organizational Leadership & Collaboration

• Lead and develop AI engineers and applied scientists through mentorship and technical leadership. 
• Partner closely with Engineering, Product, and Data leaders to ensure aligned execution.
• Represent AI capabilities and strategy internally and, as needed, with customers and partners. 

QUALIFICATIONS 

• 10+ years of experience in AI/ML, applied analytics, or advanced data systems, including 3–5 years leading technical teams delivering production GenAI capabilities.
• Demonstrated experience applying generative and agentic AI capabilities to intelligence applications, including investigative analysis, entity and relationship discovery, pattern detection, and analyst-driven workflows in high-stakes or mission-critical environments.
• Strong technical expertise in agentic AI, workflow automation, orchestration frameworks, and evaluation techniques.
• Experience designing systems that minimize hallucinations and enforce safe, predictable AI behavior.
• Hands-on experience with cloud-native AI infrastructure, inference optimization, and cost-aware system design.
• Ability to translate complex AI concepts into practical, mission-ready product capabilities.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and non-technical teams.
• Experience operating in regulated, high-stakes, or mission-critical environments is strongly preferred. 

EDUCATION 

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI/ML, or a related technical field required. 
Master’s degree or PhD preferred. 

Benefits at Babel Street (just to name a few...)

• Health Benefits: Babel Street covers 85-100% monthly premium costs for Medical, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability insurances – for you and your family!
• Retirement Plans: Babel Street offers both a Traditional and Roth 401(K) with a very competitive match.
• Unlimited Flexible Leave: We trust our employees to manage their own time and balance their personal and work lives.
• Holidays: Babel Street provides employees with 12 paid Federal Holidays
• Tuition Reimbursement: We are committed to investing in our employees. One way we do that is with our Tuition Reimbursement Program for continuing education.                 

Babel Street is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. Further, Babel Street will not discriminate against applicants for inquiring about, discussing or disclosing their pay or, in certain circumstances, the pay of their co‐worker, Pay Transparency Nondiscrimination. In addition, Babel Street's policy is to provide reasonable accommodation to qualified employees who have protected disabilities to the extent required by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances where a particular employee works. Upon request, we will provide you with more information about such accommodations.