Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Team Lead (Active Secret Clearance)

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Team Lead (Active Secret Clearance) based in the United States. Join a mission-driven engineering team developing advanced AI systems for complex, real-world government applications. In this senior technical leadership role, you will combine hands-on machine learning engineering with customer-facing collaboration, guiding solutions from initial design and data preparation through deployment and delivery. You will tackle challenging technical problems, shape production-ready systems, and help ensure AI models remain reliable, effective, and trustworthy beyond testing environments. Working closely with engineers, customers, and cross-functional teams, you will provide technical direction, mentor colleagues, and translate complex requirements into practical outcomes. The role offers a remote or hybrid working arrangement based out of Austin, Texas, with opportunities to engage directly with customers and contribute to impactful projects. Accountabilities: - Lead the design, development, and delivery of complex, production-level machine learning and AI solutions, from data shaping and analytics to end-user implementation. - Serve as a hands-on technical contributor while providing leadership and guidance across engineering teams and customer environments. - Define project scope, establish technical plans, coordinate resources, and drive execution through successful delivery. - Build, train, evaluate, optimize, and deploy machine learning models for real-world applications. - Design and implement algorithms, data structures, production analytics, and software architectures using appropriate engineering patterns and cloud technologies. - Collaborate directly with customers to understand their challenges, translate feedback into technical requirements, and shape future solutions. - Communicate technical concepts clearly and professionally to engineering teams, customers, and other stakeholders. - Mentor and support engineers, fostering strong technical practices and effective collaboration across distributed teams. - Travel to customer locations or project environments as required, with travel of up to 25%. Requirements: - Advanced degree in Data Science, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or a related discipline, along with at least 10 years of relevant professional experience.

- Demonstrated ability to lead, manage, and mentor cross-functional engineering teams across office-based, remote, and customer-facing environments. - Proven experience defining, scoping, planning, and executing complex technical solutions in production environments. - Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills, including the ability to explain sophisticated technical topics clearly. - Broad proficiency in programming languages used in machine learning, with strong expertise in Python and at least one systems programming language. - Strong knowledge of algorithms, data structures, production analytics, software design patterns, and cloud-based development. - Extensive experience building, training, evaluating, and/or optimizing the deployment of machine learning models. - Proficiency with modern software engineering tools, workflows, and development practices. - Active Secret security clearance or higher and U. S. citizenship are mandatory. - Willingness and ability to travel up to 25% of the time. Additional experience that would be valuable: - Kubernetes (K8s) and horizontally scaled architectures. - Messaging and streaming technologies such as NATS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ. - Development of AI agents and agentic workflows. - Working with complex and varied data types. - Delivering technology solutions in secure government environments. Benefits: - Base salary: $230,000–$280,000 per year.