Senior Machine Learning Engineer (Active Secret Clearance)
Striveworks · Tacoma, WA
$185,000–$230,000from the description
Jul 21, 2026
Tacoma, WA
Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role focused on building and deploying machine learning systems for government customers, primarily at a military installation near Tacoma, WA. Day-to-day work spans designing data engineering pipelines, developing models across image, video, text, geospatial, and time-series data, and contributing to a proprietary AI operations platform. The role suits an experienced ML engineer comfortable working directly with customers in secure, mission-critical environments.
Senior level · 6+ years · Bremerton-Silverdale-Port Orchard, WA · 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 $137,172 (middle half $96,445–$164,970). 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 (9)
The role sits at the boundary between ML/data science (model development, drift monitoring, data pipelines across image/video/text/geospatial/time-series data) and software engineering (design patterns, systems programming language, software engineering fundamentals). 15-2051 Data Scientists was chosen as primary because model development and ML operations are the core deliverable; 15-1252 Software Developers is a close runner-up given the strong software engineering emphasis.
Joint Base Lewis–McChord is in the Tacoma/Pierce County area. The closest CBSA is Bremerton-Silverdale-Port Orchard (14740); the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue CBSA (42660) is also a reasonable match — the base straddles the two metro areas but is most commonly associated with the Tacoma metro.
An active Secret clearance (or above) is explicitly required as a hard gate.
The BS degree requirement is a hard gate; an advanced degree is listed under the 'nice to have' section.
TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn are listed together with 'and/or' phrasing — TensorFlow is used as the primary name with PyTorch and scikit-learn as alternatives, reflecting that any one of the three satisfies the requirement.
Several preferred items ('algorithms', 'data structures', 'systems programming language', 'design patterns') are listed under the required qualifications as 'software engineering fundamentals' — these are marked as required accordingly.
Skills such as 'data engineering pipelines', 'unstructured data', 'AI agents', 'client-server architecture', and 'secure government environments' are retained as named capability areas even though they are not specific tool names, because the posting explicitly calls them out as distinguishing criteria. Generic soft-skill and methodology items were omitted.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): client-server architecture.
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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