Drimva

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

First seen Oct 31, 2026 · Last verified Nov 4, 2026 (UTC)