Senior Software Engineer, Data PlatformLocation: United States
Employment Type: Full-time
Compensation: $200K-$240K base salary + equity
Focus: Data Platform, ML Infrastructure, Sensor Data, Maritime Autonomy, Defense Technology
About the Role
Our client is hiring a
Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform to help build the real-time ML data platform behind autonomous and semi-autonomous marine systems.
This is a high-impact role for an engineer who is passionate about autonomy, maritime sensing, defense technology, and large-scale data infrastructure. You'll help define how raw maritime signals become clean, consistent, labeled datasets that power perception models, foundation models, evaluation systems, and AI-driven analytics.
The core challenge is building a platform that can ingest, process, store, reprocess, and analyze data from thousands of marine systems across a wide range of sensors, hardware interfaces, and data sources - all with a high bar for security, reliability, reproducibility, and performance.
What You'll Do
- Build and operate a real-time ML data platform for autonomous and semi-autonomous marine systems
- Define how raw maritime signals become clean, consistent, labeled datasets for perception and foundation models
- Build post-processing pipelines that align, resample, and calibrate multi-sensor data
- Create robust backfill and reprocessing frameworks for historical data
- Apply new filters, synchronizations, label corrections, and metadata enrichments across large datasets
- Establish lineage, versioning, and reproducibility standards for ML experiments
- Build dataset discovery and access APIs/SDKs for downstream users
- Enable teams to query datasets by time, region, modality, labels, and quality flags
- Instrument data quality metrics across completeness, corruption, drift, label density, class balance, and regional coverage
- Build dashboards, alerts, and canary dataset builds to improve data reliability
- Optimize storage layouts for fast reads, parallelization, compression, chunking, sharding, locality, and prefetching
- Partner closely with ML, perception, hardware, and product teams to map data contracts to model needs
What We're Looking For
- Strong experience building data platforms, ML infrastructure, or large-scale data processing systems
- Experience owning dataset quality, reproducibility, lineage, and evaluation fidelity
- Strong Python experience and comfort with modern data tooling
- Experience with tools such as PyArrow, Polars, Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, or similar libraries
- Experience working with audio, vision, telemetry, sensor, or time-series data
- Strong understanding of data pipelines, dataset versioning, metadata, and quality monitoring
- Experience building APIs, SDKs, or access layers for data discovery and consumption
- Ability to design systems that support both real-time and historical reprocessing workflows
- Comfort working closely with ML, perception, hardware, and product teams
- Strong ownership, technical judgment, and ability to operate in a fast-moving startup environment
Bonus Experience
- Experience owning "dataset-as-a-product" systems used across multiple model families
- Experience building curated corpora with strong lineage, documentation, and reproducibility
- Experience designing dataset splitting or sampling strategies by time, platform, geography, class, signal quality, or similar dimensions
- Experience preventing data leakage and improving model generalization through thoughtful dataset design
- Hands-on experience with labeling workflows, ontologies, consensus systems, QA, or label-store integrations
- Experience with Go, Rust, or TypeScript for services
- Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect
- Experience with metadata and lineage tools such as MLflow or Weights & Biases
- Exposure to edge or sensor data, including audio, sonar, video, telemetry, time synchronization, or geospatial context
- Experience in defense, maritime, autonomy, robotics, aerospace, or national security technology
Why This Opportunity
- Join a mission-driven company building technology for the maritime domain
- Work on hard data infrastructure problems across autonomy, sensing, perception, and ML
- Build the platform that turns raw sensor data into reliable model-ready datasets
- Partner closely with a high-caliber team across software, hardware, ML, and product
- Help shape foundational systems as an early member of the team
- Work on technology with real implications for global security, maritime operations, and autonomous systems
- Step into a role with significant ownership, technical depth, and long-term impact
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Long-term equity incentive program with significant growth potential
- Flexible PTO and paid holidays
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
- 401(k)
- Lunch and snacks provided in office
- Unique work environment blending technology, maritime systems, and defense
