Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Team Lead (Active Secret Clearance)

Join a mission-driven engineering team developing advanced AI systems for complex, real-world government applications. In this senior technical leadership role, you will combine hands-on machine learning engineering with customer-facing collaboration, guiding solutions from initial design and data preparation through deployment and delivery. You will tackle challenging technical problems, shape production-ready systems, and help ensure AI models remain reliable, effective, and trustworthy beyond testing environments. Working closely with engineers, customers, and cross-functional teams, you will provide technical direction, mentor colleagues, and translate complex requirements into practical outcomes. The role offers a remote or hybrid working arrangement based out of Austin, Texas, with opportunities to engage directly with customers and contribute to impactful projects.

• Advanced degree in Data Science, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a related discipline, along with at least 10 years of relevant professional experience.

• Demonstrated ability to lead, manage, and mentor cross-functional engineering teams across office-based, remote, and customer-facing environments.

• Proven experience defining, scoping, planning, and executing complex technical solutions in production environments.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to explain sophisticated technical topics clearly.

• Broad proficiency in programming languages used in machine learning, with strong expertise in Python and at least one systems programming language.

• Strong knowledge of algorithms, data structures, production analytics, software design patterns, and cloud-based development.

• Extensive experience building, training, evaluating, and/or optimizing the deployment of machine learning models.

• Proficiency with modern software engineering tools, workflows, and development practices.

Additional experience that would be valuable:

• Kubernetes (K8s) and horizontally scaled architectures.

• Messaging and streaming technologies such as NATS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ.

• Development of AI agents and agentic workflows.

• Working with complex and varied data types.

• Delivering technology solutions in secure government environments.