Machine Learning EngineerLocation: McLean, VA (hybrid); occasional travel to Durham, NC and customer sites
About the RoleWe're seeking a Senior ML Engineer (Technical Lead) with deep hands-on expertise in machine learning and computer vision, who can also lead DoD-focused programs, own customer engagement, contribute to business development, and help grow and manage a local engineering team in McLean over time. You'll lead end-to-end technical delivery - from data to deployment - while serving as the primary technical point of contact for our customers.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys building production-grade ML systems, mentoring engineers, and translating complex technical work into compelling customer outcomes.
What You'll Do- Lead programs end-to-end: Scope requirements, set technical strategy and milestones, plan resourcing, manage risks, and deliver results for DoD-focused ML/CV projects.
- Own customer relationships: Run technical discussions, requirement discovery, demos, standing meetings, and briefings with senior stakeholders; turn feedback into clear roadmaps.
- Stay deeply hands-on (50-70%):
- Build data pipelines, train/evaluate CV models, and write production code.
- Design, train, and optimize detection/segmentation/tracking models and custom computer-vision pipelines; handle imbalanced data, domain shift, and real-world constraints.
- Deploy models to production (typically on the edge), instrument for monitoring, and iterate with CI/CD.
- Contribute to business development: Write technical sections of proposals/white papers, help shape capture strategy, provide level-of-effort estimates, and present prototypes.
- Communicate and publish: Present results to high-level DoD and industry customers; author technical reports; publish novel work in classified/unclassified settings when applicable.
Minimum Qualifications- Experience: 5+ years designing, building, and deploying machine learning systems in production (8+ preferred). Strong track record leading technical delivery for complex projects.
- ML/CV expertise:
- Deep understanding of ML fundamentals (e.g., gradient descent, cross-validation, ROC/PR curves, confusion matrices, mAP).
- Computer vision experience with modern architectures (e.g., YOLO family, CenterNet, RetinaNet, Detectron2, ViTs, segmentation networks), augmentation strategies, and evaluation.
- Experience with data curation/annotation workflows and dataset quality control.
- Software engineering: Python (NumPy, scipy, pandas/polars), PyTorch (preferred) or TensorFlow, git, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and code quality practices.
- MLOps & deployment: Experiment tracking, Docker, ONNX/TensorRT, deploying inference services to the edge (e.g., NVIDIA Jetson).
- Communication & leadership: Excellent technical communication, customer-facing experience, and proven ability to lead cross-functional efforts.
- Education: B.S. in engineering, math, computer science, or related field; M.S./Ph.D. preferred.
- Clearance: Eligibility for U.S. security clearance. This requires U.S. citizenship.
Preferred Qualifications (Bonus) - Prior Department of Defense project experience, including briefing senior stakeholders and navigating DoD acquisition processes.
- Active Secret or TS/SCI clearance; experience working in classified environments.
- Experience managing or mentoring engineers; contributing to hiring and performance development.
- Experience with proposal writing (SBIR/STTR, RFPs), technical volume authorship, and live demos.
- Experience with multi-sensor fusion, signal-processing, tracking, synthetic data generation, domain adaptation, or semi/active learning for data-limited environments.
- Familiarity with edge hardware optimization, and performance profiling.
- Open-source contributions, publications, or patents in ML/CV.
Why This Role Matters You'll be a key technical leader in our McLean office - setting technical direction, building a local team, and ensuring our DoD partners see tangible mission impact from AI/ML solutions. If you thrive in high-impact environments where you can both build and lead, we'd love to talk.
Benefits- Competitive salary, cash bonus, equity structure, and 401k with employer contributions
- Excellent health care coverage, including dental and vision plans
- Parental leave
- Short-term and long-term disability insurance
- Life insurance
- Flexible work schedule
- Tuition support
- PTO and paid holidays
Visit us: www.covar.com
