Technical Leader of AI at Kitware
Clifton Park, NY
$140,000–$215,000
Jul 28, 2026
Clifton Park, NY
Sep 25, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
This role leads government- and commercially-funded R&D programs in AI, machine learning, and computer vision at a research software firm. Responsibilities span business development (winning new contracts and SBIRs), managing and mentoring multidisciplinary engineering teams, delivering complex research projects on schedule and budget, and publishing results at premier venues. It suits a technically deep leader with both hands-on software design experience and a track record of growing funded programs.
Senior level · 6+ years · Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY · Master's required · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
Pay in the description: $140,000–$215,000
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How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
What the occupation pays Median $161,730 (middle half $130,631–$202,507). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (8)
The role is a genuine hybrid: it requires hands-on software design and technical depth (closer to a senior IC) but also explicitly involves supervising staff, leading teams, and winning funded programs — the primary framing is program/team leadership, which maps to 11-3021. 15-1299 is listed as the runner-up for the strong IC/research component.
Degree requirement: the JD states 'PhD … with a minimum of 6 years relevant experience and/or a Master's degree with 8 years experience.' The minimum hard gate is a Master's degree (with more experience), so the degree requirement is set to Masters. A PhD is the preferred path but not the only one.
Total years minimum is set to 6, reflecting the lower bound of the PhD track. The Master's track requires 8 years, but 6 is the stated floor across both paths.
The clearance requirement states 'Active TS/SCI … or the willingness and ability to apply for and maintain a TS/SCI security clearance with CI-polygraph.' Because the JD gates on either holding or being able to obtain TS/SCI (with polygraph), this is treated as a hard clearance gate at the TopSecretSci level.
U.S. citizenship is a hard contractual requirement stated in the posting.
The posting names VIAME and Telesculptor as open-source platforms the team builds, but does not gate candidates on familiarity with them — they appear only in the company/team description narrative.
No specific programming languages or frameworks are listed as candidate requirements; the technical skills extracted reflect the domain areas explicitly called out in the required qualifications.
Requires a TS/SCI clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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