Location: San Diego, CA (Hybrid – must be local) | Type: Full-time
About Navaide
Navaide partners with federal clients to deliver mission-focused solutions across financial management, ERP, and digital transformation. We bring deep domain expertise, practical execution, and a people-first culture to complex government environments.
Catalysts for a Stronger Tomorrow
At Navaide, we exist to empower organizations to evolve and adapt in a rapidly changing world. By combining human ingenuity with transformative technology, we develop innovative solutions that drive progress for the people and systems that strengthen our nation. Our mission is rooted in agility, scalability, and a commitment to exceeding expectations, ensuring impactful results for our clients and communities.
How You Will Make an Impact:
We are seeking a proactive, mid-to-senior Data Science / AI Analyst to accelerate the adoption of generative AI, intelligent agents, and process automation for a Navy enterprise IT organization in San Diego. You will partner with senior technical leadership to identify AI capability gaps, help shape a multi-year AI enablement strategy, and build working prototypes that demonstrate measurable operational value.
This is not a traditional dashboard developer role. The successful candidate is a self-starter who blends hands-on engineering with strategic advisory work, engages directly with stakeholders, and delivers results with limited oversight. The role will grow as the organization's AI maturity grows.
Key Responsibilities:
Assess current and future AI capability gaps and develop technical papers, roadmaps, risk assessments, and actionable recommendations for leadership.
Take in, evaluate, and prioritize proposed AI use cases, and drive the highest-value ones from concept through delivery.
Evaluate commercial and open-source AI technologies, including large language models, agent frameworks, and automation platforms, through market research, proofs of concept, and migration planning.
Design, build, and test AI agents, retrieval-augmented knowledge bases, and workflow automations in secure, accredited cloud and generative AI environments.
Develop AI-enabled capabilities such as natural language querying, automated leadership summaries, document analysis, and decision-support recommendations.
Validate AI-generated outputs against source data, business rules, and subject matter expert feedback.
Develop the data pipelines, integrations, and data quality controls that AI solutions depend on.
Help establish standards for AI governance, risk management, data quality, documentation, and responsible AI use so solutions can scale.
Partner with functional subject matter experts, data owners, and field innovation teams to translate business needs into technical solutions.
Represent the team in cross-organizational AI and data working groups.
Deliver training and knowledge transfer that builds self-service AI and analytics capability across user communities.
Present findings, prototypes, and recommendations to technical and non-technical audiences.
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor's degree and 5+ years of professional data science experience (mid level), or Master's degree and 10+ years (senior level), in Data Science, Data Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field.
U.S. citizen, eligible to obtain and maintain a U.S. Government SECRET clearance.
Must be local to San Diego and able to work on-site at a government facility on a regular hybrid schedule.
Strong Python and SQL, including data pipeline development.
Hands-on experience building LLM applications: retrieval-augmented generation, agents and tool use, prompt engineering, and output evaluation.
Experience with Azure and/or AWS and data platforms such as Databricks.
Understanding of data governance, data quality, access control, and responsible AI practices.
Ability to explain technical findings in plain language to senior military and civilian leaders.
Ability to meet…