Senior Machine Learning Research Scientist

What you'll do

• Design and run applied research studies to build prototypes and reference implementations for government missions.
• Lead technical execution by defining tasking, sequencing milestones, and maintaining delivery quality across the team.
• Establish credible evaluation strategies and test pipelines to assess ML performance, robustness, and trustworthiness.
• Translate mission goals into measurable technical outcomes and communicate progress clearly to stakeholders.
• Mentor junior staff to improve research rigor, engineering practices, and delivery habits.
• Maintain awareness of frontier AI developments to shape the lab's research direction and future work selection.
• Build agentic AI capabilities and multimodal learning systems for tactical edge environments.

What we're looking for

• BS in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Statistics, or related field with 10 years of relevant experience.
• MS in a related field with 8 years of relevant experience.
• PhD in a related field with 5 years of relevant experience.
• Deep expertise in agentic systems, LLM reliability, CV evaluation, robustness, TEVV pipelines, multimodal learning, or edge ML.
• Strong engineering capability to build and maintain high-quality prototypes, evaluation infrastructure, and repeatable experimentation workflows.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical workstreams and coordinate multi-person execution.
• Must be able and willing to work onsite at an SEI office in Pittsburgh, PA or Arlington, VA 5 days per week.
• Must be eligible to obtain and maintain a Department of War security clearance.