Senior NLP & ML Systems Engineer

Protagonist Therapeutics; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 95,000 - 141,000; Full time

Job summary

Protagonist Therapeutics is seeking 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'll collaborate with product, engineering, and client-facing teams to expand AI at Protagonist, stay current with advances in ML and infra, and ensure compliance with GovCloud/ITAR constraints.

Qualifications

• Must have deep NLP expertise (transformers, LLMs, embeddings) and proven ability to deploy production ML systems.
• Strong Python skills; fluency with PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem.
• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines;ML orchestration/experiment tracking.

Responsibilities

• Identify high-impact NLP use cases with product/engineering/data science teams and translate business needs into ML solutions.
• Own production NLP pipelines: narrative detection, NER, span classification, stance and characterization analysis, event extraction, deduplication.

Skills

NLP expertise

Python

ML deployment

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Master's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face

AWS GovCloud

Kubernetes

Docker

Terraform

CI/CD

Metaflow

Argo Workflows

MLflow

OpenSearch

Django

REST APIs

React

Job description

Protagonist Therapeutics is seeking 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'll collaborate with product, engineering, and client-facing teams to expand AI at Protagonist, stay current with advances in ML and infra, and ensure compliance with GovCloud/ITAR constraints.