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Annotation Engineer Jobs in Washington (NOW HIRING)

Equivalent experience may substitute for degree on a 2-for-1 basis. * 5+ years total professional experience, 3+ years in data engineering or annotation operations * CVAT - deployment and day-to-day ...

You'll partner with the Solution Architect and Data/Annotation Engineer to turn raw corpora into high-quality, model-ready data. This role suits an engineer who's fluent across modern AI tooling and ...

Administer CVAT + SAM 2 toolchain in coordination with the Data & Annotation Engineer * Facilitate standups, working sessions, and phase gate preparation * Coordinate Technical Writer onboarding and ...

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Annotation Engineer information

What does an annotation engineer do?

An annotation engineer is responsible for labeling and annotating data, such as images, text, or videos, to train machine learning models. They use specialized tools and follow guidelines to ensure data quality and accuracy, often working closely with data scientists and AI developers. This role requires attention to detail and knowledge of data annotation processes and tools.
Infographic showing various Annotation Engineer job openings in Washington as of August 2026, with employment types broken down into 87% Full Time, 8% Part Time, and 5% Contract. Highlights an 86% Physical, 5% Hybrid, and 9% Remote job distribution.

Data & Annotation Engineer

Innodata Inc.

Washington, DC

$55 - $60/hr

Full-time

Re-posted 16 days ago


Innodata rating

7.5

Company rating: 7.5 out of 10

Based on 6 frontline employees who took The Breakroom Quiz

165th of 246 rated software companies


Job description

About the Program: 

Innodata's Federal Practice builds the trusted data layer for critical infrastructure Trust & Safety work. Partnering with a leading systems integrator, we're delivering a modern, governed data services platform in a secure federal (IL4) environment. Over an intensive 20-week phase, you'll help stand up a data services storefront, a DataCard governance framework, synthetic data integration, and Databricks write-back capabilities.

About the Role: 

As the Data/Annotation Engineer, you'll be hands-on with the data itself. You'll administer the annotation toolchain, manage annotation workflows across the corpus, and produce the per-dataset documentation that feeds our governance framework. You'll work with the AI Solutions Engineer to ensure the data going into our models is accurate, well-labeled, and fully traceable. This role is for someone detail-obsessed who understands that great AI starts with disciplined, well-governed data.

Key Responsibilities:

  • Receive, validate, ingest, and ontology-map the ODIN mission-aligned corpus from AFS delivery
  • Produce the ODIN load report: corpus description, ontology mapping, readiness state
  • Configure CVAT annotation pipeline against the Phase 1 starter kit rule pack
  • Operate both self-service and lightweight white-glove annotation paths during Phase D corpus production
  • Produce 50-100 label demonstration corpus across synthetic and mission-aligned content
  • Support QA/Evaluation Lead on QC execution and corpus annotation dry-runs
  • Associate DataCard provenance records with annotated and synthetic outputs in coordination with the Solution Architect

Must-Have Qualifications:

  • Bachelor's degree in Data Science, Computer Science, or related field preferred. Equivalent experience may substitute for degree on a 2-for-1 basis.
  • 5+ years total professional experience, 3+ years in data engineering or annotation operations
  • CVAT - deployment and day-to-day operation required; this is not a nice-to-have
  • Annotated dataset ingest pipelines: schema mapping, format validation, ontology alignment
  • Full-motion video (FMV) annotation concepts and tooling
  • Python scripting for data wrangling, validation, and format conversion
  • Active Secret clearance with TS/SCI eligibility

Nice-to-Have Qualifications:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field required; Master's degree preferred. Equivalent experience may substitute for degree on a 2-for-1 basis
  • CVAT annotation platform - AI feature configuration and operation
  • DoD or IC data program experience: CUI, distribution statements, federal data governance
  • Evaluation design for AI/ML training data: IAA methodology, drift detection, model performance measurement
  • Video understanding or FMV annotation experience
  • DataCard or ML data provenance framework familiarity

The expected hourly salary range for this position is $55 to $60 p/hour, based on experience, skills, and qualifications.

Note to Candidates: 

Phase D corpus production (Weeks 17-19) is the core demonstration deliverable. Candidates must be genuinely comfortable operating CVAT at production quality against a mission dataset under a milestone deadline


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