Staff Production Engineer- Public Sector

The goal of a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Scale is to lead the design and deployment of agentic AI systems that operate in real-world, mission-critical government environments. On the Public Sector team, you’ll work at the intersection of agentic ML, systems engineering, and applied research, building foundational infrastructure that enables AI systems to reason, plan, and act reliably at national scale. Our Public Sector ML Team partners directly with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies to deploy AI into classified and regulated environments. Through flagship programs like Donovan and Thunderforge , we are advancing the next generation of agentic AI for geospatial reasoning, planning, and decision support. Staff Machine Learning Engineers play a central role in setting technical direction, owning core architectures, and translating ambitious ideas into production systems trusted by government operators. You will: Lead the architecture and implementation of agentic AI systems, with a focus on long-horizon reasoning, orchestration, and system-level reliability. Build and scale agents that perform complex geospatial reasoning, including interpreting, generating, and reasoning over maps and spatial data. Design and improve retrieval systems across large collections of static and semi-structured documents, enabling agents to surface high-signal context efficiently. Fine-tune and evaluate embedding models to improve recall and precision for mission-critical datasets. Design memory systems that allow agents to persist state, operate over long contexts, and learn from prior interactions. Own and evolve shared agentic infrastructure and core libraries, enabling reuse across teams, products, and Public Sector contracts. Define evaluation strategies for agentic systems, including robustness testing, failure-mode analysis, and regression testing in production environments. Partner closely with engineering managers, product leaders, and researchers to scope high-impac

Scale’s rapidly growing International Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. Our core work consists of: Creating custom AI applications that will impact millions of citizens Generating high-quality training data for custom LLMs Upskilling and advisory services to spread the impact of AI As a Full Stack Software Engineer (Forward Deployed), you’ll collaborate directly with public sector counterparts to quickly build full-stack, AI applications, to solve their most pressing challenges and achieve meaningful impact for citizens. At Scale, we’re not just building AI solutions—we’re enabling the public sector to transform their operations and better serve citizens through cutting-edge technology. If you’re ready to shape the future of AI in the public sector and be a founding member of our team, we’d love to hear from you. You will: Serve as the lead technical strategist for public sector engagements, converting ambiguous mission requirements into robust architectural roadmaps and guiding onsite implementation Architect the fundamental frameworks for production-grade AI applications, setting the gold standard for how interactive UIs, backend systems, and AI models are integrated at scale to deliver reliable outcomes. Guide the evolution of cloud infrastructure, ensuring security, global scalability, and long-term system integrity across all environments. Direct the development of core platforms and shared services, ensuring they solve cross-cutting needs for diverse global client use cases. Partner with cross-functional leadership to steer the technical roadmap, mentoring senior and junior staff and ensuring all products align with a cohesive, future-proof technical architecture. Bridge the gap between the field and the core platform by turning real-world client lessons into the reusable patterns that power the entire engineering team. Ideally you’d have: Masters or Phd in Computer Science or eq

About the role Scale's Global Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. As a Staff Applied AI Engineer, you'll raise the bar for how AI gets built, governed, and evaluated across the team. You'll define standards that other engineers adopt, such as evaluation methodologies for agents and MLOps practices, while acting as the senior technical voice for the most sensitive AI decisions our clients face. What you'll do Define standards for responsible AI, model governance, and production MLOps that get adopted broadly across the Global Public Sector team Build or validate the highest-risk parts of strategic AI systems and use those systems to establish standards other teams can adopt. Architect AI systems designed to prevent systemic failure, and lead the resolution of the most severe incidents tied to model safety or data integrity Build reusable AI capabilities, such as production-ready agent implementations built on proven architectures, fine-tuned models, or evaluation methodologies, that other engineers and clients can build on Advise on which new AI developments are worth adopting, and help set the technical roadmap for the domain Act as the senior technical partner to client leadership on AI strategy Coach Senior Applied AI Engineers, delegate ownership of technical domains, and build systems and practices that enable multiple teams to deliver safer AI Contribute to recruiting and representing Scale's AI work externally What we look for 7+ years of engineering experience, with a multi-year track record owning AI/ML systems in production Experience judging the quality of training data, selecting the right adaptation method for a given model, evaluating fine-tuning results, and balancing serving cost, latency, and quality trade-offs Experience owning an AI-powered product end to end, including direct involvement in the AI's behaviour rather than implementing ML work scoped by another team A tr

Scale’s rapidly growing International Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. Our core work consists of: Creating custom AI applications that will impact millions of citizens Generating high-quality training data for custom LLMs Upskilling and advisory services to spread the impact of AI As a Full Stack Software Engineer (Forward Deployed), you’ll collaborate directly with public sector counterparts to quickly build full-stack, AI applications, to solve their most pressing challenges and achieve meaningful impact for citizens. At Scale, we’re not just building AI solutions—we’re enabling the public sector to transform their operations and better serve citizens through cutting-edge technology. If you’re ready to shape the future of AI in the public sector and be a founding member of our team, we’d love to hear from you. You will: Serve as the lead technical strategist for public sector engagements, converting ambiguous mission requirements into robust architectural roadmaps and guiding onsite implementation Architect the fundamental frameworks for production-grade AI applications, setting the gold standard for how interactive UIs, backend systems, and AI models are integrated at scale to deliver reliable outcomes. Guide the evolution of cloud infrastructure, ensuring security, global scalability, and long-term system integrity across all environments. Direct the development of core platforms and shared services, ensuring they solve cross-cutting needs for diverse global client use cases. Partner with cross-functional leadership to steer the technical roadmap, mentoring senior and junior staff and ensuring all products align with a cohesive, future-proof technical architecture. Bridge the gap between the field and the core platform by turning real-world client lessons into the reusable patterns that power the entire engineering team. Ideally you’d have: Masters or Phd in Computer Science or eq

Scale’s rapidly growing Global Public Sector team is focused on using AI to address critical challenges facing the public sector around the world. Our core work consists of: Creating custom AI applications that will impact millions of citizens Generating high-quality training data for custom LLMs Upskilling and advisory services to spread the impact of AI As a Full Stack Software Engineer (Forward Deployed), you’ll collaborate directly with public sector counterparts to quickly build full-stack, AI applications, to solve their most pressing challenges and achieve meaningful impact for citizens. At Scale, we’re not just building AI solutions—we’re enabling the public sector to transform their operations and better serve citizens through cutting-edge technology. If you’re ready to shape the future of AI in the public sector and be a founding member of our team, we’d love to hear from you. You will: Serve as the lead technical strategist for public sector engagements, converting ambiguous mission requirements into robust architectural roadmaps and guiding onsite implementation. Architect the fundamental frameworks for production-grade AI applications, setting the gold standard for how interactive UIs, backend systems, and AI models are integrated at scale to deliver reliable outcomes. Guide the evolution of cloud infrastructure, ensuring security, global scalability, and long-term system integrity across all environments. Direct the development of core platforms and shared services, ensuring they solve cross-cutting needs for diverse global client use cases. Partner with cross-functional leadership to steer the technical roadmap, mentoring senior and junior staff and ensuring all products align with a cohesive, future-proof technical architecture. Bridge the gap between the field and the core platform by turning real-world client lessons into the reusable patterns that power the entire engineering team. Ideally you’d have: Masters or Phd in Computer Science or equivale

About Scale Scale’s mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions. As the leading AI data foundry, we provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world’s most advanced models — fueling breakthroughs in generative AI, defense, and autonomous vehicles. We partner with leading enterprises and governments to bring AI into production that performs when it matters most, combining rigorous evaluation with full-stack deployment so our customers can build AI they can trust. About the Team Applied Intelligence Systems (AIS) is part of the Scale Generative AI Platform (SGP), focused on pushing the frontier of what agentic applications can do across diverse enterprise and government use cases. We build the infrastructure and tooling that power agentic AI in production, paired with applied ML research, design, and evaluation to ensure these systems perform reliably at the scale our customers demand. AIS spans multiple workstreams — agent evaluation and oversight, orchestration and tool-use infrastructure, model and systems optimization, and applied research on new agent capabilities — and this role is not scoped to any single one of them. We’re growing fast, with increasing traction across both commercial and public sector customers, and we’re just getting started — this team will define what dependable, production-grade agentic AI looks like. About the Role As a Staff Machine Learning Research Engineer, you will operate across the full breadth of AIS’s technical needs — wherever the hardest ML problem in agentic AI happens to be that quarter. This could mean training and fine-tuning models, designing evaluation and observability systems, building improvement loops from production data, prototyping novel agent architectures, or designing internal systems and tooling that boost productivity across teams. You’re not tied to one team’s roadmap; you’re expected to move to where the technical leverage is highest, and t