Data Scientist at Steampunk
McLean, VA
$125,000–$160,000from the description
Aug 2, 2026
McLean, VA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A federal-contracting firm is hiring a Data Scientist to join its AI & Data Exploitation Practice, building and deploying ML/AI models for US government clients. The role spans the full modeling lifecycle — exploratory analysis, feature engineering, model development, and production integration — alongside data visualization and stakeholder communication. It suits a mid-career technologist comfortable working across data pipelines, cloud analytics platforms, and MLOps workflows.
Mid level · 2+ years · Bachelor's required · Full-time
Long application — this platform typically asks you to create an account and re-enter your work history.
“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
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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 Aug 4, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
No specific work location is stated in the posting. Steampunk primarily serves federal clients in the Washington, DC area, but no city or remote status is confirmed — location fields left blank.
The clearance requirement is framed as 'ability to hold a position of public trust with the US government,' which is a suitability determination, not a formal US security clearance (Confidential/Secret/TS). Clearance is therefore set to None.
The posting lists 2–4 years of ML/AI and data solution experience, placing this at the lower end of the experience range; seniority is assessed as Mid despite the word 'seasoned' in the opening, which reads as marketing language rather than a formal level claim.
Queue modeling and survival analysis (1+ year) are stated requirements but name no specific tool or framework, so they are omitted from the skills list per extraction rules.
Scala appears both as an alternative programming language and as part of the big data stack (Hadoop/Spark/Scala); it is captured as a standalone required skill to reflect the explicit big-data context.
Flask, MLOps/DBOps framework knowledge, and Solr/Elasticsearch are explicitly called out as 'a plus' in the posting and are marked as preferred accordingly.
Read the full posting
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