Lead AI Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 11, 2026.
Job Summary :
The Lead AI Engineer will lead the development of high-reliability computer vision and speech/audio processing systems for Digital Green's farmer-facing platforms. We are seeking a Lead AI Engineer with deep experience in computer vision and audio/ASR pipelines to design and deploy end-to-end production systems at scale. You will build optimized inference pipelines for image and audio models and work with multimodal data (audio and image) to serve farmer-facing advisory tools.
In this role, you will also define and run robust evaluation frameworks, ensure model reliability, and operationalize production-grade vision and audio ML pipelines with monitoring and continuous improvement. You will collaborate closely with product, engineering, and field teams to build systems that perform effectively in low-resource, real-world agricultural contexts.
Key Responsibilities :
- Build and evaluate ASR systems optimized for agricultural domain content and rural speech patterns.
- Develop pipelines for multilingual transcription, diarization, noise handling, and accent robustness.
- Develop and evaluate computer vision models for crop and livestock use cases, including disease detection, animal identification, and health assessment.
- Build image and video processing pipelines for real-world farmer-submitted content, including low-light, blur, and noise handling.
- Test vision and audio models against adversarial inputs, spoofing, and data leakage risks.
- Collaborate with security teams to ensure compliance with data privacy frameworks.
- Mentor junior engineers in ASR and computer vision model evaluation, fine-tuning, and deployment.
Qualifications & Skills :
- Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- 6+ years of proven experience as an AI/ML engineer, data scientist, or software engineer.
- Deep expertise in computer vision and speech/audio processing pipelines.
- Proficiency with Python and standard CV/audio frameworks (PyTorch, OpenCV, torchaudio, Librosa).
- Experience with ASR models (Whisper, Azure Speech) and CV architectures (CLIP, Vision Transformers, YOLO, Mask R-CNN).
- Experience with model quantization, pruning, and distillation for edge deployment.
Why Digital Green :
- Work at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and real-world social impact.
- Own end-to-end AI systems - from research and prototyping through production deployment at scale.
- Collaborate with a mission-driven, multidisciplinary team.
- Backed by leading global philanthropic partners, with the resources and runway to build for the long term.
Skills
Computer Vision, Python, PyTorch, OpenCV, Speech Recognition, Machine Learning, R-CNN