Staff ML Engineer: Agentic AI for National Security

FDE Times; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 274,000 - 343,000; Full time

Job summary

Scale is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for its Public Sector team in the Washington DC area. You will lead architecture and deployment of agentic AI systems, partnering with defense and intelligence agencies to deliver reliable, multi-step reasoning and geospatial capabilities.

You will mentor teams, drive core libraries, and define evaluation strategies while ensuring production readiness and security requirements, including a TS clearance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience building and deploying applied ML systems in production environments.
• Deep experience with agentic systems, autonomous workflows, or ML systems that reason and act over multiple steps.
• Strong background in ML systems engineering, including model serving, pipelines, monitoring, and evaluation.
• Hands-on experience with retrieval systems, embeddings, or representation learning.
• Proficiency in Python and modern ML frameworks (ex: PyTorch), with the ability to design systems end to end.

Responsibilities

• Lead the architecture and implementation of agentic AI systems, focusing on long-horizon reasoning and system reliability.
• Build and scale agents that perform complex geospatial reasoning over maps and spatial data.
• Design and improve retrieval systems across large document collections for high-signal context.
• Fine-tune embedding models to improve recall and precision on mission-critical datasets.
• Design memory systems for long contexts and learning from prior interactions.
• Own and evolve shared agentic infrastructure and libraries for reuse across teams.
• Define evaluation strategies including robustness testing and production regression testing.
• Collaborate with managers, product leaders, and researchers to scope high-impact initiatives.
• Mentor engineers to raise the bar for system design and production readiness.

Skills

Agentic ML systems

ML systems engineering

Python

PyTorch

Staff-level leadership

Job description

Scale is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer for its Public Sector team in the Washington DC area. You will lead architecture and deployment of agentic AI systems, partnering with defense and intelligence agencies to deliver reliable, multi-step reasoning and geospatial capabilities.

You will mentor teams, drive core libraries, and define evaluation strategies while ensuring production readiness and security requirements, including a TS clearance.