Software Developer Specialist in Austin, TX (HYBRID) only locals

Job title: Software Developer Specialist

Location: Austin, TX (HYBRID)-only local to Austin or Texas -(4 days onsite 1 day remote)

Duration: 12+ Months

Client: RITM1788244

A Software Developer Specialist will focus on engineering-related software services, including model ingestion, automated quantity extraction, plan conformance checks, and CI/CD automation. Leveraging PEPS ensures compliance with procurement regulations while enabling rapid onboarding of specialized talent.

The Senior Software Developer Specialist will be responsible for advancing TxDOT''s AI initiatives by extending existing proof-of-concept (POC) solutions into scalable, production-ready web applications that directly support transportation engineering workflows. This role will focus on transforming early-stage AI models and prototypes—such as those supporting plan review automation, roadway asset detection, and digital delivery—into fully integrated applications accessible through secure, user-friendly web interfaces across the enterprise.

WORK LOCATION: Working remotely is accepted in accordance with TxDOT’s policies. The resource must be in the office a minimum of four days a week, or as approved by TxDOT.

Note: Resource may be required to work evenings or weekends to meet business needs and deadlines.

Required skills:

• 8 years of Cloud Platforms: Experience with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, or OCI for deploying and managing ML workloads. We leverage AI/ML tools across all major cloud providers (Azure AI, AWS SageMaker/Bedrock, Google Cloud Platform Vertex AI, OCI AI Services).
• 8 years of DevOps: Ansible, CI/CD, Docker and Kubernetes experience.
• 8 years of Databases: SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL/vector databases.
• 8 years of Scripting: Proficient in both Bash and PowerShell for automation.
• 8 years of CI/CD Experience: Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or similar automation pipelines.
• 3 years of Python: 3-5+ years production experience, this is your primary language.
• 3 years of NLP/LLMs: Experience with transformers (BERT, GPT, T5), RAG systems, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, or building LLM applications.
• 3 years of Time Series: Forecasting models, anomaly detection, sequential data modeling, or real-time monitoring systems.
• 3 years of Recommender Systems: Collaborative filtering, ranking models, personalization engines, or content recommendations.
• 3 years of MLOps Tools: Production experience with MLflow, Weights & Biases, Kubeflow, Airflow, or similar platforms.
• 3 years o distributed Training: Large-scale model training, multi-GPU/multi-node setups, efficient data parallelism.
• 3 years of Computer Vision: Production CV experience with PyTorch/TensorFlow, OpenCV, YOLO, object detection, segmentation, or real-time inference.
• 3 years of Feature stores (Feast, Tecton) or advanced feature engineering.
• 3 years of Model optimization: quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation.
• 3 years of LLM Models: Ollama, Huggingface, or other non-frontier models
• 2 years of AI/ML Production: Built and deployed 2-3+ ML models serving real users, not just experiments.

Preferred skills:

• 1 year Experience with Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and analyzing spatial data.
• 1 year Prior experience in the transportation, logistics, or smart city sectors.
• 1 year Background in Computer Vision (object detection, image segmentation) applied to infrastructure or vehicular data.
• 1 year Familiarity with public sector data compliance, security, and governance standards.
• 1 year Experience with the Unreal gaming engine and real world digital twinning
• 1 year Experience with Google Maps Cesium API
• 1 year Experience with Polygonflow Dash and its capabilities.