AI/ML Engineer, Mid (Clearance Required) at Noblis
Reston, VA
$132,900–$207,750from the description
Jul 13, 2026
Reston, VA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A mid-to-senior engineering role focused on building and operating machine learning systems in classified national security settings. Day-to-day work spans model development and containerization, Kubernetes-based production deployments, AWS cloud infrastructure, and MLOps pipeline construction. The role also carries a technical leadership dimension — setting standards and guiding other engineers. An active TS/SCI clearance with polygraph is required.
Senior level · 5+ years · National · TS/SCI clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
Posted 2 times — it's one opening, so apply once.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $122,874 (middle half $87,544–$162,374). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The role is a genuine hybrid of ML/data science (model development, LLMs, MLOps) and software engineering (full-stack, containerization, cloud infrastructure). It is classified as Data Scientists (15-2051) because model development, LLM deployment, and MLOps are the primary stated focus; Software Developers (15-1252) is the close runner-up given the full-stack and infrastructure scope.
An active TS/SCI clearance WITH a current Polygraph is a hard gate — this is TopSecretSci with polygraph.
The degree requirement is flexible: the JD accepts a Bachelor's + 5 yrs, Master's + 3 yrs, Associate's + 8 yrs, or HS diploma + 11 yrs. No single degree is hard-required, so the degree requirement is set to None. The minimum experience floor across all paths is 5 years (Bachelor's path), used as the overall years minimum.
The Desired Qualifications section separately calls out '7+ years of experience designing, developing, and deploying machine learning systems at scale.' This is a preferred (not required) threshold and does not override the required 5-year minimum.
No work location is specified in the posting; Noblis is headquartered in Reston, VA, but the JD notes remote/hybrid status is subject to change based on Noblis and/or government requirements. Remote is set to false given the TS/SCI + Polygraph requirement, which typically mandates on-site work in a SCIF.
Ray appears both in the required responsibilities narrative (as a framework) and in the Desired Qualifications as a distributed computing tool. It is listed as preferred since it appears under Desired Qualifications; its mention in the responsibilities section is stack context rather than a gating requirement.
Requires a TS/SCI clearance — the cleared population is a small fraction of this occupation, so the real candidate pool is materially smaller than the estimate below, which does not model clearance.
Read the full posting
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