Protagonist
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
$95K–$141K
Washington DC +1 · Senior · Full-time · Posted Aug 25, 2026
- Location
- Washington DC
District of Columbia, United States - Experience
- 5 years with a bachelor’s degree, or 3 years with a master’s degree.
- Education
- Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field; or master’s degree in one of these fields.
- Visa sponsorship
- U.S. person eligible to work on government contracts.
About the job
Build and operate production NLP and LLM systems for Protagonist’s client-facing communication analytics platform, owning the ML lifecycle from design through deployment.
What you'll do
- Develop scalable NLP pipelines for tasks such as narrative detection, entity linking, event extraction, and analysis of multilingual text.
- Build ML workflows and LLM features, including RAG, agents, model fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment in production infrastructure.
- Collaborate across product, engineering, and data science; guide ML architecture and strategy and mentor colleagues.
What they ask for
- Bachelor’s degree and 5 years of experience, or master’s degree and 3 years of experience, in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related technical field.
- Track record building and deploying production ML systems with deep NLP expertise, including transformers, LLMs, and embedding models.
- Strong Python skills and fluency with PyTorch and the Hugging Face ecosystem.
- Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, CI/CD, ML orchestration, vector search, and LLM applications.
Nice to have
- Active or prior SECRET clearance.
- Experience with AWS GovCloud, full-stack ML product integration, or compliance-constrained environments.
Pay
$95,000-$141,000 USD base salary
Tools
Metaflow, Argo Workflows, Kubernetes (EKS), AWS Bedrock, OpenSearch, Django, PostgreSQL, Kafka
AI focus
Develop production NLP and LLM applications, including multilingual text analysis, transformer fine-tuning, RAG, agents, and ML evaluation.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative