Every organization runs on intelligence: years of accumulated knowledge, decisions, and context. As AI takes on more of that work, companies face a choice: rent that intelligence from vendors who keep the data, the context, and the results, or own it.
OpenTeams exists to make ownership possible.
Founded by Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy and SciPy, and built by people with deep roots across the open-source ecosystem, including NumPy, SciPy, PyTorch, and Jupyter, we help enterprises and governments build AI they control, govern, and evolve themselves.
If that sounds like your kind of work, we'd like to meet you.
Location: This is a U.S.-remote position, with preference given to candidates in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Work Authorization: U.S. citizenship required
Clearance: Candidates must be eligible and willing to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance, which includes a federal background investigation.
Salary Range: $145,000–$250,000 USD, dependent on experience level and location
About the RoleWe’re seeking an Engineering Architect to own the end-to-end technical design of a secure AI test and evaluation platform supporting Government teams responsible for assessing AI systems before fielding.
The program spans shared evaluation interfaces, dataset and model tooling, ML infrastructure, web services, and the packaging and delivery systems used to deploy capabilities into secure Government environments. This role ensures those components form a coherent, scalable, secure, and interoperable technical solution.
You’ll establish architecture standards, make build-versus-buy-versus-adopt decisions across the open-source landscape, resolve cross-cutting technical decisions, and guide the solution from initial concept through deployment and sustainment. You’ll also serve as a senior technical advisor to Government stakeholders and internal engineering teams.
Key Responsibilities- Architect and maintain comprehensive system blueprints, strategic technology roadmaps, and foundational design principles for sophisticated open-source artificial intelligence solutions.
- Design and govern interface standards to guarantee seamless integration between platform services, evaluation frameworks, underlying infrastructure, and third-party systems.
- Assess emerging open-source and commercial technologies, thoroughly documenting trade-offs regarding technical feasibility, operations, security posture, and long-term viability.
- Deliver strategic recommendations on build, buy, or adopt decisions across the software portfolio.
- Incorporate public-sector hosting, identity management, cybersecurity, compliance accreditation, and integration mandates into core system designs from project inception.
- Conduct cross-functional engineering design reviews to resolve complex architectural dependencies and align team initiatives.
- Institute enterprise architecture standards, repeatable software patterns, security guardrails, and rigorous design review workflows.
- Serve as the primary technical advocate during public-sector design reviews, program reviews, and strategic partner engagements.
- Convert high-level mission goals, program objectives, and security policies into actionable technical tasks for development teams.
- Offer high-level technical guidance on open-source ecosystems including PyTorch, JAX, Ray, Kubeflow, MCP, and open-weights foundation models.
- Pinpoint, formalize, and proactively neutralize technical risks across every stage of the software life cycle.
- Drive business development and proposal efforts by authoring technical architecture documentation, effort estimates, roadmaps, and statements of work.
- Collaborate with infrastructure, platform, machine learning, data engineering, security, and software teams to ensure unified implementation of target designs.
- Steer technical solutions from production deployment through operational testing, acceptance, and long-term sustainment.
- Advise engineering staff and tech leads, driving decisive, structured engineering practices throughout the organization
- Must hold U.S. citizenship and maintain eligibility for Secret clearance authorization.
- Eight or more years delivering enterprise-grade software engineering solutions.
- At least three years leading end-to-end platform design and technical strategy.
- Proven track record building and deploying production distributed cloud architectures.
- Comprehensive mastery spanning CI/CD, modern package distribution, machine learning platforms, data pipelines, and API services.
- Specialized domain mastery in MLOps, generative AI, agentic systems, or cloud infrastructure, paired with practical familiarity across adjacent technical domains.
- Advanced Python proficiency complemented by rigorous knowledge of object-oriented design, architectural patterns, and systemic software fundamentals.
- Demonstrated success establishing contract interface specifications, foundational engineering roadmaps, and org-wide design standards.
- Experience conducting thorough technical evaluations and documenting strategic build-versus-buy trade-offs.
- Adept at proactively resolving enterprise challenges involving system security, high availability, resilience, and operational scalability.
- History of steering cross-functional initiatives across multi-disciplinary engineering groups.
- Exceptional communication capabilities for articulating technical topics to both executive leadership and engineering peers.
- Skilled at translating complex technical choices, system risks, and structural trade-offs for diverse public-sector and executive audiences.
- Self-directed contributor with a strong ability to drive outcomes within remote, decentralized team environments.
- Demonstrated history architecting solutions for defense, intelligence, or federal defense initiatives.
- Working knowledge of modern public-sector software paradigms, including Platform One and defense DevSecOps frameworks.
- Proven track record engineering system infrastructure for air-gapped, isolated, or security-restricted networks.
- Background designing artificial intelligence validation infrastructure, data management tooling, and evaluation pipelines.
- Practical familiarity with Risk Management Framework protocols, authority to operate standards, and accredited system boundaries.
- Active engagement in open-source ecosystems through core maintainership, pull requests, technical blogging, or conference engagement.
- Direct experience leveraging the PyData and Scientific Python software stack.
- Proven capabilities in technical consulting, solution advisory, or client-facing architectural roles.
- Possessing a current or prior federal security clearance.
At OpenTeams, growth isn’t just about the company—it’s about you.
We believe the best careers are built at the edge of your potential. That is where new tools, ideas, and technologies change the world. Here, you’ll work alongside pioneers of AI, solving problems that matter: making AI more transparent, more ethical, and more empowering. As your skills grow, our career framework provides a pathway and recognition of that increased impact.
Opportunities aren’t limited by geography. You’ll collaborate with global experts, contribute to open source projects that power the world’s technology, and stretch your skills daily. That global perspective and diversity makes our solution more universal and robust. We are committed to continuing to celebrate diversity on our team.
Supported people are successful people. We offer 100% employer paid medical premiums for employees and self-managed PTO with a minimum time off requirement, so that our teams are able to do their best work.
We invest in curiosity, creativity, and ownership. That means you’ll be trusted to boldly innovate, supported to learn fast, and celebrated for successful collaboration.
OpenTeams understands that valuing diverse creative practices and forms of knowledge is crucial to and enriches the company’s core mission. We encourage applications from everyone, including members of all equity-seeking communities, such as (but certainly not limited to) women, racialized and Indigenous persons, disabled people, persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions.
We are an equal opportunity employer - all qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for recruitment, interviews, employment, training, compensation, promotion, and related activities. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, color, national origin, pregnancy, ancestry, domestic partner status, disability, sexual orientation, age, genetic predisposition, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable laws. OpenTeams will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on these characteristics or any other unlawful behavior, conduct, or purpose.
Skills Required
- U.S. citizenship
- Ability to obtain and maintain a Secret security clearance
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience
- 3+ years of system or solution architecture ownership
- Experience owning distributed, cloud-native production systems
- Broad experience across package management, CI/CD, ML infrastructure, data platforms, and web services
- Deep expertise in at least one relevant area, including numerical computing, distributed or high-performance computing, cloud infrastructure, machine learning, MLOps, data engineering, generative AI, or agentic AI
- Proficiency in Python and strong understanding of software engineering principles, system design, and design patterns
- Experience defining system interfaces, integration patterns, architecture standards, and technical roadmaps
- Experience evaluating open-source and commercial technologies and documenting architectural tradeoffs
- Ability to manage security, scalability, reliability, interoperability, and maintainability concerns
- Experience guiding technical work across multiple engineering teams or disciplines
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with technical and nontechnical audiences
- Ability to explain technical decisions, risks, and tradeoffs to customers, executives, and engineering teams
- Ability to work independently and collaborate within a remote, distributed team
- Architecture experience supporting Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, or other federal programs
- Familiarity with the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design, Platform One, or comparable Government platform patterns
- Experience designing systems for air-gapped, disconnected, or highly restricted environments
- Experience designing AI/ML test and evaluation platforms or related model, dataset, and evaluation tooling
- Experience with security authorization processes, Risk Management Framework requirements, or accredited systems
- Active participation in open-source communities
- Experience within the Scientific Python or PyData ecosystem
- Experience in consulting, customer-facing, or technical advisory roles
- Active or previously held U.S. security clearance
What We Do
OpenTeams is at the forefront of open source support, offering a wide range of practice areas led by a network of Open Source Architects. With over 680 open source technologies, our team provides comprehensive services including strategy and consulting, custom development, integration, migration, and 24/7 support. Our practice areas cover various domains, such as Machine Learning Operations, Cloud Optimization, Data Science and Engineering, SaaS and Cloud Applications, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, PyTorch Hardware Optimization, PyTorch Artificial Intelligence System Building, and High-Performance Systems. Each solution is staffed by experienced professionals who assist businesses in addressing specific challenges and leveraging open source technologies to achieve their goals. OpenTeams is dedicated to helping clients build better software with reliable open source support.
