Senior Machine Learning Engineer at STR
Arlington, VA
$155,000–$195,000from the description
Jul 13, 2026
Arlington, VA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior engineering role focused on taking AI and machine learning research from prototype to production for national security applications. Day-to-day work spans building backend services, scalable APIs, and frontend interfaces, as well as deploying models across cloud, on-premises, desktop, mobile, and edge environments including air-gapped systems. The role suits an experienced engineer comfortable working across the full stack and across the ML lifecycle, who holds an active Secret clearance.
Senior level · 6+ years · Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH · Bachelor's required · Secret clearance · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
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 $169,742 (middle half $134,780–$187,781). 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 (8)
The role spans both production software engineering and ML/AI research, making it a genuine hybrid between 15-1252 (Software Developers) and 15-2051 (Data Scientists); the emphasis on backend services, APIs, UI, and deployment pipelines tips the primary classification to 15-1252.
STR has offices near Boston MA, Arlington VA, Dayton OH, Melbourne FL, and Carlsbad CA; no single primary location is specified. Boston is used as the CBSA given it is listed first, but candidates at any of those offices may be considered.
The JD requires 'proficiency in at least one systems-level language with manual or low-level memory management' without naming a specific language; C, C++, Rust, and Go are listed as the most common substitutes.
The ML frameworks requirement ('modern Python-based frameworks') names no specific library (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn); it is captured as a general ML model development skill.
Svelte and React appear under a 'is a plus' qualifier in the frontend section and are treated as preferred.
An active Secret clearance is explicitly required; U.S. citizenship is a prerequisite per the posting.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): ML model development.
Requires a Secret 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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