Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Public Sector

Salary: $235,200–$294,000 USD annually, plus potential equity and benefits.

Security clearance: An active TS security clearance is required.

Company

Scale AI develops reliable AI systems, high-quality training data, and full-stack technologies for enterprises and government organizations.

What you will do

• Own the architecture, implementation, delivery, and evaluation of agent capabilities for mission-critical government applications.
• Define new technical patterns, lead implementation, and deploy state-of-the-art models into production.
• Maintain and improve models and agents through retraining, hyperparameter tuning, and architectural updates.
• Build evaluation benchmarks, LLM judges, verifiers, and scalable ML infrastructure.
• Partner with product, research, government users, and subject-matter experts to shape technical direction.
• Mentor engineers, review technical work, communicate trade-offs, and represent machine learning across engineering and product teams.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience building and deploying applied machine learning systems in production.
• Production experience with generative AI, agentic AI, NLP, deep learning, reinforcement learning, or computer vision.
• Experience owning architectural decisions and shipping agentic systems with real production traffic and rigorous evaluation.
• Strong knowledge of algorithms, data structures, object-oriented programming, and Python.
• Experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow and mentoring or reviewing other engineers.
• Active TS security clearance required.

Nice to have

• Graduate degree in computer science, machine learning, or artificial intelligence.
• Experience with AWS or GCP and cloud-based ML deployment.
• Experience with classified, air-gapped, or IL5+ environments, geospatial data, or GEOINT.
• Experience with inference optimization, fine-tuning, SFT, reinforcement learning, or embedding models.
• Familiarity with ML evaluation frameworks and agentic model design.

Culture & Benefits

• Health, dental, and vision coverage.
• Retirement benefits, learning and development stipend, and generous paid time off.
• Potential commuter stipend and equity compensation for eligible roles.
• Approximately 10% travel for customer interaction and team needs.
• Inclusive equal-opportunity workplace with reasonable accommodation support.