Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Protagonist · Washington DC · United States · On-site
Pay: USD 95,000 – 141,000 a year
Posted Aug 25, 2026
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Join Our Talented Team at Protagonist
We fuse rigorous, methodologically sound analysis with our cutting-edge technology platform, Narrative Analytics®. This powerful combination enables us to quantitatively analyze open-source media, deliver strategic recommendations, and craft executive-level communication strategies for clients with missions that matter.
Why Us?
Our team is a vibrant mix of communication specialists, data scientists, and subject matter experts with extensive experience across U.S. Government agencies, non-profit organizations, and Fortune 500 companies. By joining Protagonist, you’ll immerse yourself in a collaborative environment where innovation thrives, and your contributions truly matter.
What We Do
Innovative Solutions: We co-develop cutting-edge solutions with our clients to address tough communication problems and capitalize on opportunities to make a tangible impact.
Data-Driven Insights: Our tools and methodologies provide actionable insights that help clients meet their communication objectives and stay ahead of global challenges.
Applied Expertise: We integrate our solutions within client organizations, leveraging our profound expertise to address critical issues and ensure sustainable success.
Be Part of Something Bigger
At Protagonist, you’ll work on compelling projects that make a real difference. We seek talented individuals eager to contribute to our mission and grow alongside us. If you’re passionate about communication, data analysis, and making an impact, we invite you to explore a career with Protagonist.
Explore Your Future with Us!
Ready to take the next step in your career? Join us at Protagonist and be part of a team that's making a difference.
Job Description
Protagonist is looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer who builds production-ready systems for mission-critical work. You bring strong engineering discipline, systems thinking, and a bias toward scalable, well-architected solutions—owning the full ML lifecycle from design to deployment.
You’re a builder and strategic partner across engineering, product, and client-facing teams, expanding what AI can do at Protagonist. You stay curious and current with advances in ML, infrastructure, and software development.
Responsibilities
Partner with product, engineering, and data science teams to identify high-impact NLP use cases and turn business needs into ML solutions that deliver measurable value
Own production NLP pipelines spanning narrative detection, NER, span classification, stance and characterization analysis, event extraction, deduplication, and knowledge-base entity linking over multi-language, noisy real-world text
Design, build, and operate production NLP pipelines, narrative detection, event classification, entity resolution and linking, deduplication — over multi-language, noisy real-world text at scale
Build and maintain ML workflows in Metaflow orchestrated on Argo Workflows and…