About this role
Bechtel seeks a Junior AI Specialist to develop practical AI solutions for engineering, procurement, and construction challenges. Working with AI specialists, data engineers, project teams, and business stakeholders, the specialist will contribute across the AI lifecycle, from identifying needs and prototyping to deployment, monitoring, and improvement. The role includes structured onboarding and mentoring.
Responsibilities
- Build AI-enabled applications, Microsoft Cowork skills, Copilot agents, prototypes, and workflow automation using Python and Azure-based technologies. Develop prompts, agent instructions, tools, retrieval strategies, and structured outputs; connect solutions to enterprise data, APIs, applications, and workflow platforms.
- Gather requirements, assess use cases and feasibility, and translate business problems into technical requirements and measurable outcomes. Prepare structured and unstructured data, including documents, spreadsheets, images, engineering drawings, and technical models.
- Create test datasets and evaluations for accuracy, relevance, safety, reliability, and user value; identify failure modes. Support AI and analytics applications, models, workflows, data pipelines, and curated datasets using Databricks and Microsoft Fabric. Participate in code reviews, testing, debugging, source control, deployment, monitoring, and documentation.
- Potential assignments include generative AI, intelligent agents, enterprise search, retrieval-augmented generation, document intelligence, and multimodal analysis.
Requirements
Typically, a bachelor’s degree in computer science, AI, machine learning, data science, software engineering, information systems, mathematics, engineering, or a related technical field with 1–2 years of experience, or 5–6 years of relevant work experience. US citizenship is required. Candidates need demonstrated Python proficiency, foundational knowledge of AI or generative AI models, machine learning, large language models, or NLP, and the ability to collaborate across disciplines and learn unfamiliar domains.
Preferred
AI, machine-learning, or software-engineering experience through internships, research, capstones, portfolios, GitHub, or personal projects; experience with Azure AI services, Microsoft Copilot, Copilot Studio, or Cowork; familiarity with RAG, agents, document processing, multimodal AI, prompt engineering, tool calling, embeddings, semantic search, or agent orchestration; and experience evaluating generative AI outputs and applying privacy, bias, security, and human-oversight concepts.
Work and compensation: The position is based in Reston, with three office days per week and part-time telework; relocation is not authorized. It is 40 hours per week and pays $84,600–$122,400 annually, with the final offer based on education, experience, and qualifications. Benefits include medical, dental, and vision plans, 160 hours of annual paid time off, nine paid holidays, paid parental leave, discretionary bonuses, and a 401(k) with matching and profit-sharing components.