Software Engineer
Babel Street · Somerville, MA
$85,000–$100,000
Jul 20, 2026
Somerville, MA
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
An early-career position on a computer vision and AI team, focused on building and maintaining pipelines for image ingestion, facial matching, object detection, scene understanding, and geolocation inference from imagery. The role also involves contributing to multimodal systems that pair vision models with large language models to enable natural-language search over image collections. It suits candidates with up to two years of relevant experience in Python and standard CV/ML frameworks.
Junior level · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Full-time
Pay in the description: $85,000–$100,000
“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
Roughly 720 people in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 150–1,100
Applicant volume Heavy — This req sits in a large pool with little in its requirements to thin it, and auto-apply tools fire at everything in the occupation. Applying early and leading with the rare skills below is what gets read.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $135,107 (middle half $108,024–$176,763). 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 explicitly framed as 'early-career' with 0–2 years of experience required, consistent with a Junior band.
The posting lists two possible office locations: Reston, VA/Washington DC and Somerville, MA. The primary CBSA is reported as Washington-Arlington-Alexandria (DC metro) since Reston, VA is the company HQ and listed first; the Boston/Cambridge metro (CBSA 14460) is an equally valid work location.
The SOC classification is a close call between 15-2051 (Data Scientists, reflecting the ML/CV modeling and research focus) and 15-1252 (Software Developers, reflecting the production Python services, APIs, and pipeline engineering). The role leans toward applied ML/CV research and model development, so 15-2051 is the primary pick with 15-1252 as the runner-up.
The education requirement states a Bachelor's degree in a technical field is 'required,' but immediately qualifies it with 'or equivalent practical experience through internships, research, bootcamps, open-source work, or professional projects.' Because equivalent experience is explicitly accepted in lieu of a degree, the degree requirement is set to None.
PyTorch and TensorFlow are listed together as interchangeable CV/ML library options ('PyTorch, TensorFlow, OpenCV, or similar tools') in the required qualifications; PyTorch is used as the primary name with TensorFlow in alternatives. OpenCV is listed alongside them but is a distinct tool and is emitted separately.
CNNs, vision transformers, feature embeddings, and image classification are listed as illustrative examples of required foundational knowledge ('such as CNNs, vision transformers, feature embeddings, or image classification'); they are captured as required skills reflecting the hard gate on foundational CV model knowledge.
Facial matching/biometric systems, image-based geolocation, multimodal AI (vision + LLMs), and entity/event extraction (NLP) appear under the 'Preferred' section and are marked accordingly.
Read the full posting
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