Data Scientist

📋 Description

• • Agile Defense, Inc. is at the forefront of innovation, driven by a commitment to action and the courage to tackle new challenges with novel solutions. We are a forward-thinking organization dedicated to embracing change and building for the future. Our vision is to deliver adaptive innovation to support our nation's most critical missions by seamlessly integrating advanced technologies, elite talent, and unparalleled agility. We leverage speed, flexibility, and ingenuity to strengthen and protect vital national interests.
• • We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Data Scientist to join our dynamic team at MacDill AFB, Tampa, FL. This pivotal role will be instrumental in supporting the design, development, and operational deployment of scalable, AI-enabled data solutions within the Department of Defense’s CDAO ADA IR program. As part of a multidisciplinary team, you will be at the heart of integrating cutting-edge analytics, machine learning, and robust engineering practices into mission-critical environments, specifically supporting operations at CENTCOM.
• • Your primary contribution will involve shaping and deploying sophisticated data pipelines, meticulously crafted pre-processing workflows, advanced feature engineering strategies, and robust machine learning services. These will be deployed within secure, containerized environments, ensuring both efficiency and security. The ideal candidate possesses a unique blend of deep statistical modeling fluency and hands-on software engineering expertise. You will thrive in a collaborative setting, working closely with product managers, full-stack developers, platform engineers, and crucial mission stakeholders. Your efforts will be key in transforming raw, complex data into actionable insights and powerful decision-support tools that directly impact national security objectives.
• • This position demands exceptional technical communication skills, a proactive and collaborative mindset, and proven experience working within agile development environments. We highly value teams that prioritize reproducibility, rigorous testing, and continuous delivery of high-quality software. Familiarity with leading cloud-based data platforms such as Databricks, Palantir, or AWS-native data services is strongly preferred and will significantly enhance your candidacy.
• • Key Objectives of this Role:
• • Design and Maintain Scalable Data Science Services: You will be responsible for planning, developing, and maintaining reusable services essential for data ingestion, transformation, and feature engineering. These services will form the backbone of our AI/ML workflows, ensuring scalability and efficiency. You will implement core data science capabilities, including but not limited to entity resolution, classification, clustering, and predictive modeling, all within secure, containerized environments that strictly adhere to CI/CD, version control, and comprehensive testing standards. A critical aspect of this objective involves close collaboration with DevSecOps engineers to seamlessly integrate these services into secure production environments, utilizing powerful tools like Databricks, Docker, and Terraform. Ensuring that these services consistently meet stringent performance, reliability, and security requirements, in alignment with DoD enterprise and cloud-native architecture, is paramount.
• • Build and Operationalize AI/ML Solutions: This objective focuses on the end-to-end development and deployment of both standalone and embedded machine learning models. These models will serve critical functions such as decision support, process automation, anomaly detection, and intricate pattern recognition. You will expertly select and implement appropriate modeling techniques, leveraging languages like Python and distributed frameworks such as Spark, or utilizing cloud-native ML frameworks like SageMaker and MLflow. Maintaining the reproducibility and interpretability of model outputs is crucial to meet the mission's transparency and audit requirements. You will also be responsible for packaging model inference services with well-documented APIs, facilitating seamless integration into end-user applications and operational dashboards.
• • Perform Exploratory Data Analysis and Communicate Insights: You will conduct in-depth exploratory data analysis (EDA) to uncover significant trends, identify data gaps, and discover opportunities within both structured and unstructured datasets. Developing compelling data visualizations and clear, interpretive summaries will be essential to support stakeholder understanding and inform product team decision-making. Translating complex analytical findings into clear, actionable recommendations using a strategic mix of visual, narrative, and quantitative communication methods is a core responsibility. Furthermore, you will actively contribute to the team’s shared library of analysis templates, reusable queries, and analytic workflows, thereby accelerating future project delivery and knowledge sharing.
• • Collaborate Across Teams to Deliver Mission Impact: Success in this role hinges on effective collaboration. You will actively engage with product managers and mission users to precisely define data and model requirements, ensuring they are tightly aligned with operational goals. You will work hand-in-hand with engineers to guarantee that data science components seamlessly integrate with technical constraints and adhere to established deployment patterns. Active participation in agile ceremonies, including sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos, is expected, where you will share progress, provide insights, and adjust priorities based on valuable feedback. Maintaining robust documentation practices is essential to enable effective handoff, ensure reproducibility, and uphold technical accountability across the team and project lifecycle.
• • This role offers a unique opportunity to apply advanced data science techniques to solve some of the nation's most pressing challenges within a supportive and innovative environment.