Senior Manager AI Foundation Model
Merlin is a Boston-based aerospace and defense technology company developing AI-powered, aircraft-agnostic autonomy software for fixed-wing aircraft.
About Merlin
Merlin’s Merlin Pilot combines hardware and software intended to perform takeoff-to-touchdown flight functions for military and civil aircraft, supporting reduced-crew and autonomous operations. The operating business began as Apollo Flight Research in 2018, became Merlin Labs in 2020, and is now operated under public parent Merlin, Inc.
Skills
Candidate Availability
Required and preferred rules are kept separate and reflect the wording in the original posting.
About the Role
You will own foundation and world-model strategy, including architecture selection, post-training, and capability roadmaps. You will lead model engineers, design constrained model interfaces, build evaluation and regression systems, establish uncertainty and out-of-distribution outputs, benchmark learned planning, and support certification-ready model decisions.
Requirements
- Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related subject
- 8+ years building AI systems
- 3+ years leading technical teams or owning a major model program
- Experience managing teams that ship AI-powered models into production
- Experience with learned systems in physical real-time products
- Expertise in world models, learned dynamics, planning or control sequence models, post-training, or constrained generation
- Experience building evaluation harnesses
- Strong PyTorch skills
- Ability to reason about C++ real-time systems
Responsibilities
- Own foundation-model and world-model technical strategy
- Lead and mentor world-model and post-training engineers
- Design constrained model interfaces for the autonomy stack
- Build evaluation harnesses, capability taxonomies, and regression suites
- Establish uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection outputs
- Benchmark learned planning against rule-based behavior planning
- Partner on certification-ready model design
- Evaluate external research for adoption or development
Benefits
- Catered lunches
- Snacks and beverages
- Health insurance
- Dental insurance
- Life insurance
- Unlimited vacation
- 401k matching