Artificial Intelligence/ Machine Learning Developer at B&A
Ashburn, VA
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Jul 22, 2026
Ashburn, VA
Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
An on-site, client-facing AI/ML developer role supporting a federal Department of Homeland Security contract. Day-to-day work centers on building, training, and deploying machine learning and generative AI models — including LLMs, RAG pipelines, and NLP applications such as chatbots — and integrating them into existing government systems. The role also involves briefing technical findings to stakeholders and requires an active Top Secret or CBP Background Investigation clearance.
Mid level · 3+ years · Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV · Top Secret clearance · Contract
“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
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 $135,107 (middle half $108,024–$176,763).
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 (10)
The clearance requirement states 'Active TS or CBP BI' — this has been mapped to TopSecret (TS). CBP Background Investigation (BI) is a DHS/CBP-specific suitability determination, not a standard DoD clearance level; the posting appears to accept either an active TS or a CBP BI as qualifying.
The role is a contract position supporting a DHS/CBP federal client and is explicitly on-site; remote is not offered.
The posting is ambiguous between Data Scientist (15-2051) and Software Developer (15-1252): the role involves both building/deploying AI applications and ML modeling/research. 15-2051 was chosen as primary given the heavy emphasis on model development, NLP, deep learning, and generative AI research; 15-1252 is a close runner-up given the front-end development and MLOps/DevSecOps requirements.
A bachelor's degree is listed as 'preferred' and the posting explicitly allows equivalent work experience, military service, or higher education as substitutes — degree requirement is therefore not a hard gate.
C/C++ is explicitly marked '(optional)' in the Required Skills section; it has been captured as preferred accordingly.
Grok (the xAI model) appears under 'Gen-AI Tools' knowledge alongside Hugging Face and OpenAI in the Required Skills section, but reads more as general awareness than a hard gate; it has been captured as preferred given the speculative nature of the tool in enterprise contexts.
The Required Skills section is unusually broad, listing a large number of specific tools across ML, NLP, front-end, and data engineering. Many of these appear as illustrative examples within a single bullet (e.g., 'Pandas / NumPy / Polars / PySpark'), but all are named under the Required Skills heading and have been marked accordingly.
No compensation figures are provided in the posting.
Requires a Top 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.
Posting is for a contract engagement — the market benchmarks below price full-time roles, so read the comp comparison with that in mind.
Read the full posting
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