NLP Scientist

Barone Consulting LLC; Bethesda (MD); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Barone Consulting LLC seeks a SETA Support Specialist to support a government research program focused on NLP for intelligence. You will assist program managers across lifecycle phases, review deliverables, track risks, and prepare briefings for leadership.

The ideal candidate has 8+ years in physics/mathematics/computer science or engineering, strong NLP/AI knowledge, experience with NLP pipelines and ML frameworks, and proven program management abilities.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics, computer science, or relevant engineering fields (electrical, computer, systems, software)
• EIGHT (8) or more years of work experience in physics, mathematics, computer science, or relevant engineering fields
• Experience with AI/ML in NLP contexts
• Experience developing or evaluating NLP pipelines and transformer architectures
• Understanding data architectures for large-scale analytics/intelligence production
• Experience with NLP tools/frameworks like Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, spaCy

Responsibilities

• Coordinate across government, academic, and industry teams
• Review and assess technical deliverables, milestones, and evaluation results
• Track risks and dependencies across performers
• Prepare reports and briefings for senior leadership
• Serve as liaison between performers, testers, government and transition partners
• Provide support for systems integration, design, modeling and data analytics

Skills

NLP concepts

AI/ML knowledge

Program management

Written communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics, computer science, or relevant engineering fields

Master’s degree or PhD in physics, mathematics, CS, or engineering with 4+ years of experience

Tools

Hugging Face

PyTorch

TensorFlow

spaCy

Job description

We are seeking a Scientific, Engineering, and Technical Assistance (SETA) Support Specialist to join our team in support of a government research organization dedicated to investing in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of national security.

The successful candidate will support the government program managers in the execution of the lifecycle of various research programs to include development of source selection materials, execution assistance, closeout, and transition. The SETA should be competent in Research and Development (R&D) programmatic reviews and procedures. The candidate will also be responsible for ensuring that project management best practices are followed by the individual programs to include performers, independent verification and validation (IV&V) entities, and within the government research organization itself.

The research programs you would support focus on developing advanced Natural Language Processing for Intelligence capabilities and methods.

The successful candidate will have subject matter expertise in NLP methodologies such as text classification, named entity recognition, topic modeling, information extraction, or transformer‑based architectures.

Responsibilities:

Support the program managers in coordination, monitoring, communication, and integration of all technical aspects of the Program lifecycle that includes:

Coordinate across government, academic, and industry research teams.

Review and assess technical deliverables, milestones, and evaluation results.

Track risks, dependencies, and integration issues across performers.

Prepare reports, technical summaries, and briefings for senior leadership.

Serve as a liaison between performers, Test & Evaluation contributors, government and transition partners;

Provide support for program related requirements for systems integration, design, development, modeling and simulation, data analytics and architecture design;

Stay current on advances in technologies relevant to the research programs and perform technical studies as requested on topics of interest to the program managers.

Provide technical support and expertise on new concepts relevant to the program managers.

Support the evaluation of Seedling concepts

Qualifications

Required:

Bachelor’s degree in physics, mathematics, computer science, or relevant engineering fields (electrical, computer, systems, software)

EIGHT (8) or more years of work experience in physics, mathematics, computer science, or relevant engineering fields (electrical, computer, systems, software).

Experiences should include, but not be limited to:

Systems engineering and integration experience in complex, data‑intensive environments

Knowledge of AI/ML (computer vision, NLP, predictive analytics, LLMs)

Demonstrated experience with NLP methodologies such as text classification, named entity recognition, topic modeling, information extraction, or transformer‑based architecture

Experience developing or evaluating NLP pipelines, including text preprocessing, tokenization strategies, model training, fine‑tuning, and optimization for mission environments

Understanding of data architectures and pipelines for large‑scale analytics/intelligence production

Familiarity with AI governance, data quality, bias mitigation, and mission assurance in operational NLP/LLM deployments

Experience creating program plans, work breakdown structures, and milestone schedules

Master’s degree or PhD in physics, mathematics, computer science, or relevant engineering fields (electrical, computer, systems, software) with FOUR (4) or more years of work experience

Experience in the Intelligence Community (IC), including requirements, CONOPS, and transition

Experience managing a multi-disciplinary R&D or T&E team

Experience as a Project Manager or Deputy Project Manager

Experience with NLP development tools or frameworks such as Hugging Face, PyTorch, TensorFlow, spaCy, or similar libraries

Ability to proactively manage multiple, concurrent tasks

Excellent writing, slide development, and editing skills, including the ability to develop succinct, comprehensive, and understandable documents using complex data from multiple sources for technical and non-technical audiences

Strong organizational, problem-solving, and time-management skills; detail oriented

Why Join Us?

This role offers the opportunity to be part of mission-critical programs advancing collection technologies and national security. You will collaborate with leading universities, research labs, and industry partners on groundbreaking research and technologies.