Senior Data Scientist

Senior Data Scientist – Integrated Mission Management (IMM)

Location:Herndon, VA / Northern Virginia (Hybrid Eligible)

About the Role

Peraton is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to support the Integrated Mission Management (IMM) program within the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) mission environment. IMM provides enterprise collection prioritization, requirements management, and intelligence search capabilities across multiple classified domains.

This position will lead the development and operationalization of AI/ML capabilities to enhance collection decision-making, prioritization frameworks, and enterprise search relevance. The selected candidate will work closely with software engineers, data engineers, product owners, and mission stakeholders to deliver scalable, explainable, and production-ready analytic solutions.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, develop, test, and deploy machine learning models supporting intelligence collection prioritization and requirements management
• Develop predictive and prescriptive analytics to enhance operational decision-making
• Implement NLP techniques for structured and unstructured intelligence data sources
• Develop ranking, scoring, and relevance models to improve enterprise search capabilities
• Engineer and validate features using large-scale data stored in Elasticsearch/OpenSearch and relational databases
• Productionalize models within containerized cloud environments (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes/OpenShift)
• Partner with Data Engineering teams to build scalable ML pipelines
• Implement model performance monitoring, evaluation metrics, and retraining strategies
• Apply explainable AI techniques consistent with governance and compliance requirements
• Document analytic methodologies, model assumptions, and data lineage
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to junior team members

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in an area relevant to the position with minimum 12 years experience; 10 years with MS/MA; 7 years with Ph.D; or 4+ additional years of experience in lieu of a degree.
• Active TS/SCI clearance required w/Poly
• Degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, or related technical field
• Advanced proficiency in Python (e.g., pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, TensorFlow)
• Experience developing, validating, and deploying machine learning models in production environments
• Strong statistical analysis, modeling, and hypothesis testing experience
• Experience working with large structured and unstructured datasets
• Experience with Elasticsearch/OpenSearch or similar search technologies
• Experience deploying solutions in AWS cloud environments
• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Ability to communicate complex analytic findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience supporting DIA, IC, or DoD mission environments
• Experience with NLP, topic modeling, entity extraction, or document classification
• Experience with graph analytics or semantic modeling
• Familiarity with data governance, model explainability, and RMF/NIST compliance
• Experience in Agile or SAFe development environments
• AWS or cloud certifications
• Experience working in cross-domain or multi-level secure environments

Peraton offers enhanced benefits to employees working on this critical National Security program, which include heavily subsidized employee benefits coverage for you and your dependents, 25 days of PTO accrued annually up to a generous PTO cap and eligible to participate in an attractive bonus plan.