Senior Agentic AI Scientist

At Leidos, you'll contribute to AI solutions that serve critical national and global missions—ranging from defense and intelligence to healthcare, energy, and space exploration. Our work emphasizes Trusted AI: systems that are transparent, ethical, resilient, and accountable. You’ll collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to transition AI research into operational environments where accuracy, security, and reliability are non-negotiable. Joining Leidos means applying your expertise to solve some of the most complex and meaningful challenges of our time.

We are looking for a motivated Agentic AI scientist who wants to work on challenging problems in a variety of domains – including enterprise IT, health, defense, intelligence, and energy – to get results that apply and go beyond the state of the art for measurably better outcomes.  We apply our knowledge, capabilities, and experience to develop and deploy Trusted Mission AI – AI that deserves to be trusted by system owners, end users, and the public – to be accurate, ethical, reliable, and adaptable.  We are looking for a researcher that is expert in envisioning, developing, and securing AI agents using generative AI and LLM-based tools to transform and add value to human workflows.

Primary Responsibilities.

The Senior Agentic AI Scientist will be creating AI agents to plan, act, assess, and deliver measurable outcomes. They will be working with a team to design, implement and deploy agentic workflows to both automate and optimize labor-intensive workflows, as well as empowering the human workforce to discover entirely new capabilities.  As a member of the Leidos AI Accelerator, they will be tasked at different times with both R&D as well as customer-facing goals, to speed the transition of novel research into impact on contract.

The tasks of the Agentic AI Scientist will include fine-tuning and optimizing generative models, potentially applying domain adaptation with supervised and unsupervised approaches.  They will develop with a combination of open source models, agentic tools, and large proprietary commercial models.  They will be developing novel approaches to securing agentic workflows and to evaluating the results for accuracy, performance, and impact.  They will be expected to ensure AI systems adhere to ethical guidelines, transparency, and fairness principles.

They should expect they may conduct research, develop prototypes, evaluate and document results, potentially through publication and presentation at conferences and other public forums.  They should also expect they may be part of a team developing solutions for deployment into operational environments, or for integration into mission systems.  They should be a self-starter while also working well within the team, collaborating and sharing discoveries and seeking feedback. 

Basic Qualifications.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science or related field and over 8  years of relevant experience, Masters with 6 years experience, or PhD with 4 years experience.
• Experience with LLMs and agent frameworks
• Good understanding of generative models
• Python proficiency
• Self-starter with high intellectual curiosity
• Great communication skills, able to explain AI model results to a non-technical audience
• Proficient in data exploration techniques and tools

Preferred Qualifications.

• Knowledgeable in developing the safeguards to prevent unintended consequences and biases in autonomous decision-making
• Experience with developing AI systems with a specific focus on Agentic AI, autonomous systems or large-scale multi-agent coordination.
• Experience programming machine learning algorithms for GPUs

Come break things (in a good way). Then build them smarter.

We're the tech company everyone calls when things get weird. We don’t wear capes (they’re a safety hazard), but we do solve high-stakes problems with code, caffeine, and a healthy disregard for “how it’s always been done.”

For U.S. Positions: While subject to change based on business needs, Leidos reasonably anticipates that this job requisition will remain open for at least 3 days with an anticipated close date of no earlier than 3 days after the original posting date as listed above.

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.