Job brief: Senior Machine Learning Engineer, Public Sector

What JoRoute checked · Checked by JoRoute

• Listed on Scale AI's own job board. JoRoute does not take listings from job ads or recruiters.
• First seen by JoRoute 2026-11-04 (4 days ago); last confirmed on the board 2026-11-08.
• The apply link opens job-boards.greenhouse.io, the address Scale AI's board gives for this job.
• No other listing with this title and place on this board in the last 90 days.
• No layoff notices (WARN) under this name in the state files JoRoute reads.

What the listing says · Employer's own words, not checked

• Pay: $196,000 to $245,000 a year
• Job type: Not stated
• Where: Denver, CO; Honolulu, HI; Washington, DC · Washington, DC
• Posted: 2026-09-10

What the job asks · Employer's own words, not checked

Level: Senior. The title says "Senior".

Must have

• This role will require an active TS security clearance
• 5+ years of experience building and deploying applied ML systems in production environments
• Graduate degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning or Artificial Intelligence specialization
• The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale;

Conditions

• Comfortable with light travel (approximately 10%) for customer interaction and team needs
• We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities.

Main duties

• Own the design and delivery of agent capabilities end to end - architecture, implementation, and the evaluation that proves they work
• Define net-new patterns in problem spaces with no established approach, propose them to the wider team, and lead the work to build them
• Take state of the art models developed internally and from the community and put them into production to solve problems for our customers and taskers
• Improve and maintain production models and agents through retraining, hyperparameter tuning, and architectural updates, while preserving core performance cha…
• Build agent-level evaluation benchmarks, LLM judges, and verifiers - and use it to hillclimb performance rather than just report on it

Lines copied from the posting, not rewritten. "Preferred" or "nice to have" items are not listed as must-haves.

How it compares · Compared by JoRoute from listings

• Typical listed pay for engineer jobs in Washington, DC: $161k a year (276 listings, 35 employers). This listing is 37% higher.
• Across Scale AI's 125 open listings, 72% of those with a posting date were first posted more than 60 days ago. How Scale AI hires

What nobody outside the employer knows · Not known

• Whether the role is already filled or on hold: employers often leave listings up.
• How many people applied, and who reads the applications.
• Where in the published range an offer would land.

Ask before you apply

1. Which of the listed places is this role based in?
2. What are the interview steps, and when should I expect to hear back?

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Next steps

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