Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Model Evaluations, Public Sector

Location: San Francisco, CA; St. Louis, MO; New York, NY; Washington, DC

Job Description

The Public Sector ML team at Scale deploys advanced AI systems—including LLMs, agentic models, and multimodal pipelines—into mission-critical government environments. We build evaluation frameworks that ensure these models operate reliably, safely, and effectively under real-world constraints. As an ML Engineer, you will design, implement, and scale automated evaluation pipelines that help customers trust and operationalize advanced AI systems across defense, intelligence, and federal missions.

You will:

• Develop and maintain automated evaluation pipelines for ML models across functional, performance, robustness, and safety metrics, including LLM-judge–based evaluations.
• Design test datasets and benchmarks to measure generalization, bias, explainability, and failure modes.
• Build evaluation frameworks for LLM agents, including infrastructure for scenario-based and environment-based testing.
• Conduct comparative analyses of model architectures, training procedures, and evaluation outcomes.
• Implement tools for continuous monitoring, regression testing, and quality assurance for ML systems.
• Design and execute stress tests and red-teaming workflows to uncover vulnerabilities and edge cases.
• Collaborate with operations teams and subject matter experts to produce high-quality evaluation datasets.
• Comfortable with light travel (approximately 10%) for customer interaction and team needs.

This role will require an active security clearance or the ability to obtain a security clearance.

Ideally you’d have:

• Experience in computer vision, deep learning, reinforcement learning, or NLP in production settings.
• Strong programming skills in Python; experience with TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Background in algorithms, data structures, and object-oriented programming.
• Experience with LLM pipelines, simulation environments, or automated evaluation systems.
• Ability to convert research insights into measurable evaluation criteria.

Nice to haves:

• Graduate degree in CS, ML, or AI.
• Cloud experience (AWS,GCP) and model deployment experience.
• Experience with LLM evaluation,CV robustness or RL validation.
• Knowledge of interpretability adversarial robustness or AI safety frameworks.
• Familiarity with ML evaluation frameworks and agentic model design.
• Experience in regulated classified or mission-critical ML domains.

Compensation & Benefits

Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary equity and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position determined by work location and additional factors including job-related skills experience interview performance and relevant education or training.Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation subject to Board of Director approval. You’ll also receive benefits including but not limited to: Comprehensive health dental and vision coverage retirement benefits a learning and development stipend generous PTO.Additionally this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.

Salary Ranges by Location

• San Francisco CA; New York NY; Seattle: $240450—$300300 USD
• Washington DC; Texas; Colorado; Hawaii: $216300—$269850 USD

Additional Notes

Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role.This allows us to ensure a fairand thorough evaluation of all applicants.

About Us

At Scale our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions.Our products provide the high-quality dataand full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models help enterprisesand governments build deploy oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta Cisco DLA Piper Mayo Clinic Time Inc.Government of Qatar U.S.government agencies including Army Air Force.We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.We believe everyone should bring their whole selves to work which is why we are proud to be an inclusive equal opportunity workplace committed regardless of race color ancestry religion sex national origin sexual orientation age citizenship marital status disability status gender identity Veteran status.We provide reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical mental disabilities.Contact accommodations@scale.com if needed.We comply with United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision. This is a full-time position requiring security clearance eligibility.