Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Public Sector

Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Public Sector

Washington, DC

The goal of a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Scale is to leverage techniques in the fields of generative AI, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and agentic AI to improve Scale's products and customer experience in production environments. Our machine learning engineers take advantage of robust internal infrastructure and unique access to massive datasets to deliver improvements to our customers.

Our Public Sector Machine Learning team is focused on deploying cutting-edge models to mission-critical government systems through products like Donovan and Thunder forge . Our work spans multiple modalities, with a strong focus on both large language models and computer vision. On the LLM side, we are developing agentic systems that help solve complex operational and planning challenges for government partners. This includes building agent frameworks that integrate with custom retrieval pipelines and production APIs, as well as evaluation tools to benchmark and refine agent behavior.

We're also advancing research in areas like reinforcement learning for agentic LLMs, with successful deployment into real-world operational environments. On the computer vision front, we're training advanced models to increase labeling throughput and automate perception tasks. Our efforts include building large-scale fine-tuning pipelines, training models across multiple modalities, and developing generalizable vision foundation models to support a wide range of defense applications.

• Take state of the art models developed internally and from the community, use them in production to solve problems for our customers and taskers
• Improve and maintain production models through retraining, hyperparameter tuning, and architectural updates, while preserving core performance characteristics
• Collaborate with product and research teams to identify and prototype ML-driven product enhancements, including for upcoming product lines
• Work with massive datasets to develop both generic models as well as fine tune models for specific products
• Build scalable machine learning infrastructure to automate and optimize our ML services
• Serve as a cross-functional representative and advocate for machine learning techniques across engineering and product organizations
• Be comfortable learning new technologies quickly and managing multiple priorities in a fast-paced environment
• Comfortable with light travel (approximately 10%) for customer interaction and team needs
• This role will require an active security clearance

• Extensive experience with GenAI, Agentic AI, natural language processing, deep learning and deep reinforcement learning, or computer vision in a production environment
• Solid background in algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented programming
• Strong programing skills in Python, experience in Tensorflow or Py Torch

• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence specialization
• Experience working with cloud platforms (eg. AWS or GCP) and deploying machine learning models in cloud environments
• Experience with computer vision, generative AI models, large language models, or agentic systems
• Familiarity with ML evaluation frameworks and agentic model design

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training.

Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive…