Lead Data Scientist - Knowledge Retrieval

Lead Data Scientist - Knowledge RetrievalPittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United StatesApply Company Description Air is the leader in Enterprise Readiness. Our mission is to establish readiness as a real-time condition that is continuously achieved. Today, a dangerous Readiness Gap exists between what the front line needs and what is delivered. Our AI-native platform, Air Enterprise Readiness, aligns development, production, delivery, and sustainment into one coordinated execution system for government agencies and industrial suppliers. By revealing true capacity, exposing real constraints, coordinating resources, and executing at the speed of operational demands, the front line gets what it needs to succeed. Job Description The Lead Data Scientist will provide visionary technical leadership to a team of data scientists and AI engineers, driving the end-to-end development and deployment of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence solutions for our National Security clientele. This crucial position is key to building a strong culture of advanced agentic search, deep research, retrieval, and AI, and to creating scalable AI platforms for the wider AI and Data Science community. As a hands-on technical leader, you will apply deep expertise in Artificial Intelligence and a keen understanding of complex Defense Acquisition challenges. Your primary focus will be to work with our proprietary and commercial datasets to find critical connections, derive actionable knowledge, and identify potential issues that help our government clients make more informed decisions. This involves designing, developing, and rapidly deploying scalable AI solutions that transform these insights into mission-critical capabilities. You will also have the opportunity to expand and grow data-driven research across Air, leading new areas to apply advanced analytics to drive strategic business and national security results. You will build and lead the development of advanced agentic search, knowledge retrieval, and deep research systems. These systems are designed to provide deep conversational knowledge explorations, robust problem solving, accurate question answering, and a suite of other search, recommendation, and discovery capabilities, transforming proprietary and commercial datasets into mission-critical insights. To excel in this position, you must be an AI expert with a strong command of data science fundamentals and a proven ability to bring data-driven solutions to life within the defense ecosystem. The ideal candidate is a highly organized problem-solver who possesses excellent oral and written communication skills, capable of translating complex AI concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences. You must be independent, driven, and motivated to jump in and roll up your sleeves to get the job done. You lead by influence and motivation, demonstrating a passion for great work and an intolerance for mediocrity. We seek an uber-smart, creative, out-of-the-box thinker who is challenged by complex defense problems and obsessed with quality and rapid prototyping/deployment, knowing how to engage in constructive dialogue to find the best path forward This role is a full-time position located out of our office in Pittsburgh, PA.  This role may require up to 10% travel Scope of Responsibilities Drive the architecture and development of the 'Air Brain,' a complex, multi-modal intelligent agent system for knowledge retrieval and deep research, serving as the central nervous architecture for powering agentic AI search, deep research, RAG, and knowledge graph systems across Air Enterprise Readiness platform. Define the multi-year technical roadmap for AI initiatives, turning vague business challenges into concrete, scalable research and product goals. Raise the collective bar by mentoring Senior-level engineers and building high-performing teams that consistently deliver state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. Drive consensus across disparate groups such as DS and AI,...