Senior Data Scientist

Job Description

The Red Gate Group is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to support the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in Reston, VA. In this role, you’ll combine technical expertise with leadership skills to solve some of the nation’s most critical challenges. You’ll work directly with clients to uncover their toughest questions, explore complex datasets, and design advanced algorithms that deliver clear, actionable insights.

As a Senior Data Scientist, you’ll not only build and deploy cutting-edge models—you’ll also mentor teammates, shape best practices, and lead efforts to translate data into mission impact. This is an opportunity to turn complex, high-volume data streams into meaningful intelligence that drives real-world decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of machine learning models for classification, extraction, summarization, and search.

• Work with clients to frame problems, identify data sources, and develop analytic strategies.

• Build end-to-end ML workflows, from data preparation and exploration to deployment and evaluation.

• Manage large-scale, production-level systems processing millions of streaming documents per week.

• Apply expertise in data cleaning, mining, analysis, and visualization to create clear, actionable results.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including MLOps and infrastructure engineers, to ensure robust deployment, monitoring, and retraining of models.

• Mentor junior team members and guide best practices in data science methodology and implementation.

• Stay at the forefront of emerging tools, frameworks, and approaches in AI/ML, NLP, and data science.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in applied data science or ML roles, including Python, NLP, and LLM implementation.

• 3+ years of experience with data exploration, cleaning, analysis, visualization, or mining.

• Experience with production-level systems, data lake environments, and streaming data (e.g., Kafka).

• Proven ability to design, implement, and iterate on ML models in real-world, high-volume environments.

• Strong grasp of infrastructure and systems concepts, particularly data pipelines and data lakes.

• Experience implementing end-to-end ML workflows from preparation to deployment.

• Active TS/SCI clearance.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Desired Qualifications

• Experience collaborating with MLOps teams on deployment, monitoring, and retraining pipelines.

• Familiarity with document indexing, search platforms, GPU workloads, and distributed storage (e.g., Cloudera).

• Experience developing algorithms with R, Python, SQL, or NoSQL.

• Knowledge of distributed data and computing tools such as Hadoop, Hive, Spark, MapReduce, or EMR.

• Hands-on experience with visualization tools like Plotly, Seaborn, or ggplot2.

• Security+ certification.