Data Science & AI/PQC Engineer — Federal Mission Solutions at Diaconia LLC
Gaitherburg, MD
$150,000–$185,000
Jun 30, 2026
Gaitherburg, MD
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A mid-level engineering role focused on building AI-driven cybersecurity and post-quantum cryptography tools for U.S. federal agencies. Day-to-day work spans developing data pipelines, training and evaluating ML models, prototyping LLM applications, and deploying cloud-native solutions in government environments. Suits candidates with a background in data science or software engineering who also have grounding in cryptographic concepts and an interest in federal cyber modernization.
Mid level · 3+ years · National · 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 $122,874 (middle half $87,544–$162,374).
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)
No work location is specified in the posting; the role is federal-mission-facing and likely requires on-site or hybrid presence at a government facility, but no city or metro is stated.
Clearance: the JD states 'U.S. citizenship and ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government security clearance; active Secret, Top Secret, or TS/SCI clearance may be required by program.' Because the posting gates on the ability to obtain a clearance (not merely mentions it as a plus), clearance is treated as required. The minimum stated level is Secret; TS/SCI is listed as a possible program requirement.
Degree: the JD lists a Bachelor's degree under Required Qualifications but immediately adds 'additional relevant experience may substitute for degree requirements,' so this is treated as no hard degree gate.
The role title explicitly says 'mid-level,' and the required experience floor is 3 years, consistent with a Mid band.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role blends data science (ML modeling, LLM/RAG, analytics) with software/cloud engineering (Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, cloud deployment) and cybersecurity analytics. Data Scientists (15-2051) best fits the primary day-to-day emphasis on ML/AI modeling and analytics; Software Developers (15-1252) is a close runner-up given the cloud-native engineering and pipeline delivery scope.
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) domain knowledge (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, crypto-agility, cryptographic discovery) is listed entirely under Preferred Qualifications despite being central to the role title; it is therefore treated as preferred.
LLM/RAG experience and agentic frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen) are listed under Preferred Qualifications.
MLOps tooling (MLflow, SageMaker, Vertex AI, Airflow, Kubeflow, Databricks) and data visualization tools (Tableau, Power BI, Plotly Dash, Kibana, Grafana) are listed under Preferred Qualifications.
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.
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