Ekele Ogbadu

Lead AI/ML Engineer · Agentic AI, RAG, LLM Systems, Secure AI Platforms

Lead AI/ML Engineer with 12+ years of software engineering experience and 4+ years of applied machine learning experience supporting mission-critical defense, cyber, and AI modernization programs. Leads directorate-level AI/ML initiatives across LLM-enabled workflows, semantic retrieval, tagging, data pipelines, evaluation systems, and operational AI adoption. Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science specializing in multimodal AI, grounded language understanding, and human-robot interaction, with hands-on experience across NLP, retrieval, computer vision, sensor fusion, and production ML systems.

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Experience

Lead AI/ML Engineer
Booz Allen Hamilton — Annapolis Junction, MD
June 2026 — Present
- Lead AI/ML training, tool development, platform enablement, and secure transition of AI capabilities into mission environments.
- Conduct AI/ML training for personnel and contribute to enterprise training approaches that standardize how users learn, evaluate, and apply AI-enabled tools.
- Develop AI-enabled tools for the AI Gallery, translating mission needs into reusable capabilities for training, knowledge discovery, experimentation, and operational support.
- Build AI platform tools and agentic workflows using LangChain/LangGraph patterns and MCP-style tool integration to support secure tool access and workflow orchestration.
- Design LLM-enabled and RAG-style workflows for tagging, semantic retrieval, ontology-driven classification, and vector search using Python, embeddings, AWS Bedrock, and OpenSearch.
- Create gold set generation workflows, retrieval evaluation loops, and prompt evaluation methods to improve tagging quality, retrieval relevance, and trust in AI-enabled tools.
- Partner with stakeholders, engineers, and platform teams to identify AI use cases, define implementation paths, and deliver secure AI/ML capabilities.
Senior AI/ML Engineer
Booz Allen Hamilton — Annapolis Junction, MD
Sep 2025 — May 2026
- Delivered the team's tagging pipeline end to end, completing a long-standing capability after rapidly learning a large codebase, designing the solution, and integrating it into the broader application.
- Designed an ontology-driven tagging architecture that structured how unstructured content was classified, tagged, and surfaced across the application.
- Developed automated data ingestion, enrichment, and feature pipelines in Python to process large-scale document and signal collections.
- Architected RAG-style tagging and semantic retrieval workflows using embeddings, AWS Bedrock, OpenSearch, vector search patterns, and LLM-enabled ranking.
- Built gold set generation workflows and MLOps-aligned evaluation loops to improve tagging accuracy, retrieval relevance, and model quality.
Senior Agile Engineer (ML Programs)
Booz Allen Hamilton — Annapolis Junction, MD
Jul 2024 — Sep 2025
- Led release operations and technical delivery coordination across multiple teams on a $200M mission program.
- Drove delivery improvements that reduced average days to completion from 167.3 to 36, and cut blocked-release time from 250.5 days to 0.
- Led daily scrums across four sites and presented release metrics, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities during PI Planning and other program forums.
AI/ML Graduate Research Assistant
UMBC — Interactive Robotics & Learning Lab — Baltimore, MD
May 2023 — Present
- Conduct applied research in multimodal grounding and grounded language understanding for human-robot interaction, integrating text, images, and sensor data including 3D point clouds, audio, and ROS bag files.
- Developed SCOUT++ from the original SCOUT dataset by cleaning, restructuring, and aligning multimodal data into 11,000+ timestamp-aligned instruction-image pairs.
- Designed end-to-end ML pipelines for preprocessing, synchronization, model training, and evaluation using PyTorch, TensorFlow, Pandas, NumPy, OpenCV, and ROS.
- Evaluated neural and GPT-based approaches for grounded instruction understanding, including ambiguity handling, contextual reasoning, and clarification behavior.
- First author on peer-reviewed research presented at the AAAI 2025 Fall Symposium, with additional first-author work accepted to IEEE RO-MAN 2026.
Software Engineering Team Lead
Prescient Edge Corporation — McLean, VA
Aug 2023 — Jul 2024
- Led engineers maintaining the MINOTAUR platform across C++, Java, React, and TypeScript, providing technical direction, code review standards, and onboarding support — improving junior engineer ramp-up time by 60%.
Machine Learning Engineer
Prescient Edge Corporation — McLean, VA
May 2022 — Aug 2023
- Developed object detection and computer vision capabilities for Hull Identification Number recognition using YOLO, TensorFlow, and OpenCV across infrared and visible imagery.
- Built real-time sensor-fusion pipelines combining radar and camera inputs to track high-speed vessels and automate camera tilt and zoom.
Software Developer
Prescient Edge Corporation — McLean, VA
Feb 2021 — May 2022
- Built and maintained mission-critical software deployed on U.S. Coast Guard rescue aircraft, integrating C++, Java, CI/CD, UDP/TCP, MIL-STD-1553, ARINC-429, and simulation tooling for hardware–software validation.
Aviation Administrationman
United States Navy
Oct 2014 — Oct 2018
- Supervised night-shift aviation maintenance administration and managed 900+ physical and digital records, using SQL and enterprise systems including NALCOMIS OMA and SYBASE to track equipment lifecycle, readiness data, and maintenance schedules.
- Served as official VAQ-132 Command Webmaster, developing and maintaining the command website.
Founder / Independent Software Developer
Early entrepreneurial experience
2007 — 2018
- Built and launched web platforms, mobile applications, games, matching platforms, and business-driven software products across iOS, Android, and the web, including ventures through Born Royal LLC.

Education

Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Expected Dec 2027
- Research: multimodal NLP and perception for real-time human–robot interaction.
M.S., Computer Science
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
May 2024
B.S., Computer Science (Data Science concentration)
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
May 2022
B.A., Mathematics
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
May 2022
Undergraduate Coursework, Computer Science
Edinboro University of Pennsylvania
2003 — 2007
- Completed 110 credits toward a B.S. in CS before leaving to build and launch entrepreneurial software products.

Technical Skills

Languages
- Python, C++, Rust, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, Bash
AI/ML & Deep Learning
- Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, Computer Vision, Multimodal AI, Information Retrieval, Semantic Search, Vector Search, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Embeddings, Classification, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion, Grounded Language Understanding, Human-Robot Interaction
- PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, OpenCV
LLM & Agentic AI Systems
- LLM Applications, AI Agents, Multi-Step AI Workflows, Tool-Using Agents, Agentic AI, LangChain, LangGraph, MCP Servers, Prompt Engineering, Prompt Evaluation, AI Workflow Orchestration, LLM Tool Integration, RAG Pipelines, Knowledge Discovery Systems
MLOps, Evaluation & Production AI
- Model Evaluation, Retrieval Evaluation, Gold Set Generation, Model Monitoring, Experiment Tracking, Dataset Versioning, ML Pipelines, CI/CD for ML Systems, Production ML Workflows, Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation, Responsible AI, AI Safety, AI Governance
Data, Search & Platforms
- OpenSearch, Vector Databases, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Pandas, NumPy, Large-Scale Data Processing, Data Ingestion, Data Enrichment, Ontology-Driven Classification, Metadata Extraction
Cloud & Infrastructure
- AWS, AWS Bedrock, EC2, S3, SageMaker, Docker, Kubernetes, REST APIs, Microservices, CI/CD, Secure AI Platform Development, ROS
Engineering & Leadership
- System Design, AI Platform Engineering, Technical Leadership, Cross-Functional Delivery, Agile/Scrum, Release Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Mission Engineering, Startup Product Development, Open-Source AI Projects, Git, GitHub/GitLab, Jupyter, React, Node.js

Certifications

AWS Certified Machine Learning — Specialty
Amazon Web Services
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services
CompTIA Security+ ce
CompTIA
Certified SAFe® 6 Practitioner
Scaled Agile
Artificial Intelligence Engineer — Expert
Booz Allen Hamilton
Artificial Intelligence Engineer — Practitioner
Booz Allen Hamilton

Ekele Ogbadu

Lead AI/ML Engineer · Agentic AI, RAG, LLM Systems, Secure AI Platforms

Experience

Lead AI/ML Engineer

Booz Allen Hamilton — Annapolis Junction, MD

June 2026 — Present

Lead AI/ML training, tool development, platform enablement, and secure transition of AI capabilities into mission environments.
Conduct AI/ML training for personnel and contribute to enterprise training approaches that standardize how users learn, evaluate, and apply AI-enabled tools.
Develop AI-enabled tools for the AI Gallery, translating mission needs into reusable capabilities for training, knowledge discovery, experimentation, and operational support.
Build AI platform tools and agentic workflows using LangChain/LangGraph patterns and MCP-style tool integration to support secure tool access and workflow orchestration.
Design LLM-enabled and RAG-style workflows for tagging, semantic retrieval, ontology-driven classification, and vector search using Python, embeddings, AWS Bedrock, and OpenSearch.
Create gold set generation workflows, retrieval evaluation loops, and prompt evaluation methods to improve tagging quality, retrieval relevance, and trust in AI-enabled tools.
Partner with stakeholders, engineers, and platform teams to identify AI use cases, define implementation paths, and deliver secure AI/ML capabilities.

Senior AI/ML Engineer

Booz Allen Hamilton — Annapolis Junction, MD

Sep 2025 — May 2026

Delivered the team's tagging pipeline end to end, completing a long-standing capability after rapidly learning a large codebase, designing the solution, and integrating it into the broader application.
Designed an ontology-driven tagging architecture that structured how unstructured content was classified, tagged, and surfaced across the application.
Developed automated data ingestion, enrichment, and feature pipelines in Python to process large-scale document and signal collections.
Architected RAG-style tagging and semantic retrieval workflows using embeddings, AWS Bedrock, OpenSearch, vector search patterns, and LLM-enabled ranking.
Built gold set generation workflows and MLOps-aligned evaluation loops to improve tagging accuracy, retrieval relevance, and model quality.

Senior Agile Engineer (ML Programs)

Booz Allen Hamilton — Annapolis Junction, MD

Jul 2024 — Sep 2025

Led release operations and technical delivery coordination across multiple teams on a $200M mission program.
Drove delivery improvements that reduced average days to completion from 167.3 to 36, and cut blocked-release time from 250.5 days to 0.
Led daily scrums across four sites and presented release metrics, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities during PI Planning and other program forums.

AI/ML Graduate Research Assistant

UMBC — Interactive Robotics & Learning Lab — Baltimore, MD

May 2023 — Present

Conduct applied research in multimodal grounding and grounded language understanding for human-robot interaction, integrating text, images, and sensor data including 3D point clouds, audio, and ROS bag files.
Developed SCOUT++ from the original SCOUT dataset by cleaning, restructuring, and aligning multimodal data into 11,000+ timestamp-aligned instruction-image pairs.
Designed end-to-end ML pipelines for preprocessing, synchronization, model training, and evaluation using PyTorch, TensorFlow, Pandas, NumPy, OpenCV, and ROS.
Evaluated neural and GPT-based approaches for grounded instruction understanding, including ambiguity handling, contextual reasoning, and clarification behavior.
First author on peer-reviewed research presented at the AAAI 2025 Fall Symposium, with additional first-author work accepted to IEEE RO-MAN 2026.

Software Engineering Team Lead

Prescient Edge Corporation — McLean, VA

Aug 2023 — Jul 2024

Led engineers maintaining the MINOTAUR platform across C++, Java, React, and TypeScript, providing technical direction, code review standards, and onboarding support — improving junior engineer ramp-up time by 60%.

Machine Learning Engineer

Prescient Edge Corporation — McLean, VA

May 2022 — Aug 2023

Developed object detection and computer vision capabilities for Hull Identification Number recognition using YOLO, TensorFlow, and OpenCV across infrared and visible imagery.
Built real-time sensor-fusion pipelines combining radar and camera inputs to track high-speed vessels and automate camera tilt and zoom.

Software Developer

Prescient Edge Corporation — McLean, VA

Feb 2021 — May 2022

Built and maintained mission-critical software deployed on U.S. Coast Guard rescue aircraft, integrating C++, Java, CI/CD, UDP/TCP, MIL-STD-1553, ARINC-429, and simulation tooling for hardware–software validation.

Aviation Administrationman

United States Navy

Oct 2014 — Oct 2018

Supervised night-shift aviation maintenance administration and managed 900+ physical and digital records, using SQL and enterprise systems including NALCOMIS OMA and SYBASE to track equipment lifecycle, readiness data, and maintenance schedules.
Served as official VAQ-132 Command Webmaster, developing and maintaining the command website.

Founder / Independent Software Developer

Early entrepreneurial experience

2007 — 2018

Built and launched web platforms, mobile applications, games, matching platforms, and business-driven software products across iOS, Android, and the web, including ventures through Born Royal LLC.

Education

Ph.D. Candidate, Computer Science

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Expected Dec 2027

Research: multimodal NLP and perception for real-time human–robot interaction.

M.S., Computer Science

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

May 2024

B.S., Computer Science (Data Science concentration)

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

May 2022

B.A., Mathematics

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

May 2022

Undergraduate Coursework, Computer Science

Edinboro University of Pennsylvania

2003 — 2007

Completed 110 credits toward a B.S. in CS before leaving to build and launch entrepreneurial software products.

Technical Skills

Languages

Python, C++, Rust, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL, Bash

AI/ML & Deep Learning

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, NLP, Computer Vision, Multimodal AI, Information Retrieval, Semantic Search, Vector Search, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Embeddings, Classification, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion, Grounded Language Understanding, Human-Robot Interaction
PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, OpenCV

LLM & Agentic AI Systems

LLM Applications, AI Agents, Multi-Step AI Workflows, Tool-Using Agents, Agentic AI, LangChain, LangGraph, MCP Servers, Prompt Engineering, Prompt Evaluation, AI Workflow Orchestration, LLM Tool Integration, RAG Pipelines, Knowledge Discovery Systems

MLOps, Evaluation & Production AI

Model Evaluation, Retrieval Evaluation, Gold Set Generation, Model Monitoring, Experiment Tracking, Dataset Versioning, ML Pipelines, CI/CD for ML Systems, Production ML Workflows, Human-in-the-Loop Evaluation, Responsible AI, AI Safety, AI Governance

Data, Search & Platforms

OpenSearch, Vector Databases, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Pandas, NumPy, Large-Scale Data Processing, Data Ingestion, Data Enrichment, Ontology-Driven Classification, Metadata Extraction

Cloud & Infrastructure

AWS, AWS Bedrock, EC2, S3, SageMaker, Docker, Kubernetes, REST APIs, Microservices, CI/CD, Secure AI Platform Development, ROS

Engineering & Leadership

System Design, AI Platform Engineering, Technical Leadership, Cross-Functional Delivery, Agile/Scrum, Release Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Mission Engineering, Startup Product Development, Open-Source AI Projects, Git, GitHub/GitLab, Jupyter, React, Node.js

Certifications

AWS Certified Machine Learning — Specialty

Amazon Web Services

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Amazon Web Services

CompTIA Security+ ce

CompTIA

Certified SAFe® 6 Practitioner

Scaled Agile

Artificial Intelligence Engineer — Expert

Booz Allen Hamilton

Artificial Intelligence Engineer — Practitioner

Booz Allen Hamilton