Data Scientist / Principal Investigator

Job Title: Data Scientist / Principal Investigator Job Category: Science Time Type: Full time Minimum Clearance Required to Start: TS/SCI Employee Type: Regular Percentage of Travel Required: Up to 10% Type of Travel: Local Anticipated Posting End: 11/30/2026 CACI's is seeking a staff-level Data Scientist/Researcher to serve as a Principal Investigator and Technical Leader in our Denver, CO AI/ML Research and Integration Team. This is a hands-on role for someone who can shape ambitious research, lead teams through technical uncertainty, and turn promising prototypes into secure, scalable capabilities with measurable mission and business impact.

Location

Denver, CO. Candidates outside Colorado should be willing to relocate. This is not a remote position.

Eligibility

Candidates must possess an active Top Secret/SCI clearance.

The Opportunity

===================

Our IRAD team researches and develops mission-focused AI and software solutions supporting Defense, National Security, Intelligence, and other customers. We work at the intersection of applied research and product delivery—identifying high-value problems, testing new approaches, building working systems, and partnering with delivery organizations to transition successful capabilities into operational use.

The Principal Investigator will help define the technical direction of a portfolio that may span generative AI and large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, natural language processing, computer vision, information extraction, recommender systems, knowledge graphs, agentic systems, and MLOps. The right candidate combines scientific judgment, strong software and systems instincts, and the ability to build alignment across researchers, engineers, customers, and business leaders.

Responsibilities

====================

* Serve as Principal Investigator and technical lead for a portfolio of applied AI research efforts; define research questions, technical approa