Staff Software Engineer, AI Foundation Models - Merlin Labs

Key Responsibilities

• Design, implement, and maintain end‑to‑end pipelines for training, fine‑tuning, and serving large foundation models in a production environment.
• Evaluate and select optimal pre‑trained models, adapting them to aerospace‑specific tasks such as flight control, anomaly detection, and mission planning.
• Build scalable data ingestion and preprocessing systems that handle noisy, high‑volume sensor streams and ensure data quality for model training.
• Develop and operate distributed training infrastructure on AWS, leveraging Kubernetes, GPU clusters, and automated scaling to reduce time‑to‑train.
• Implement robust ML‑Ops practices, including CI/CD for models, monitoring, versioning, and automated rollback mechanisms.
• Collaborate with cross‑functional teams—software, hardware, and domain experts—to integrate AI capabilities into flight‑control software stacks.

Requirements

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on large‑scale machine learning systems.
• Deep expertise in Python and major ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Proven experience building cloud‑native, containerized training and inference pipelines on AWS and Kubernetes.
• Strong background in data engineering, including handling unstructured, high‑velocity data streams.
• Demonstrated ability to design, deploy, and maintain production ML‑Ops workflows, including monitoring, logging, and automated model lifecycle management.