Senior Machine Learning Engineer

Join Our Talented Team at Protagonist

We fuse rigorous, methodologically sound analysis with our cutting-edge technology platform, Narrative Analytics®. This powerful combination enables us to quantitatively analyze open-source media, deliver strategic recommendations, and craft executive-level communication strategies for clients with missions that matter.

Our team is a vibrant mix of communication specialists, data scientists, and subject matter experts with extensive experience across U.S. Government agencies, non-profit organizations, and Fortune 500 companies. By joining Protagonist, you'll immerse yourself in a collaborative environment where innovation thrives, and your contributions truly matter.

• Innovative Solutions: We co-develop cutting-edge solutions with our clients to address tough communication problems and capitalize on opportunities to make a tangible impact.
• Data-Driven Insights: Our tools and methodologies provide actionable insights that help clients meet their communication objectives and stay ahead of global challenges.
• Applied Expertise: We integrate our solutions within client organizations, leveraging our profound expertise to address critical issues and ensure sustainable success.

At Protagonist, you'll work on compelling projects that make a real difference. We seek talented individuals eager to contribute to our mission and grow alongside us. If you're passionate about communication, data analysis, and making an impact, we invite you to explore a career with Protagonist.

Job Description

Protagonist is looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer who builds production-ready systems for mission-critical work. You bring strong engineering discipline, systems thinking, and a bias toward scalable, well-architected solutions-owning the full ML lifecycle from design to deployment.

You're a builder and strategic partner across engineering, product, and client-facing teams, expanding what AI can do  stay curious and current with advances in ML, infrastructure, and software development.

• Partner with product, engineering, and data science teams to identify high-impact NLP use cases and turn business needs into ML solutions that deliver measurable value
• Own production NLP pipelines spanning narrative detection, NER, span classification, stance and characterization analysis, event extraction, deduplication, and knowledge-base entity linking over multi-language, noisy real-world text
• Design, build, and operate production NLP pipelines, narrative detection, event classification, entity resolution and linking, deduplication - over multi-language, noisy real-world text at scale
• Build and maintain ML workflows in Metaflow orchestrated on Argo Workflows and Kubernetes (EKS), including GPU-accelerated training and batch inference
• Develop LLM-powered features on AWS Bedrock: RAG pipelines with vector search on Open Search, tool-using agents, and document-analysis workflows - within Gov Cloud/ITAR constraints
• Fine-tune and deploy transformer models (classification, embeddings, entity linking) for domain-specific and foreign-language content
• Establish ML evaluation frameworks regression testing, hallucination detection, quality metrics and define success criteria with product managers
• Integrate ML services into our Django/PostgreSQL platform and event-driven infrastructure (Kafka, Redis, Open Search)
• Lead technical discussions to align cross-functional teams on ML strategy, architecture, and implementation
• Mentor others, share knowledge, and help evolve ML practices - balancing innovation with practical delivery

• U.S. person eligible to work on government contracts; active or prior SECRET clearance preferred
• Bachelor's and 5 years of experience, or master's degree and 3 years of experience, in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field
• Proven track record building and deploying production ML systems, with deep NLP expertise (transformers, LLMs, embedding models)
• Strong Python skills and fluency with PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem
• Hands-on experience with AWS (Gov Cloud…