Director, AI Foundation Models & Safe Autonomy

Lever, Inc.; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 230,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental

Life insurance

Unlimited vacation

401k with match

Job summary

Merlin Labs in Boston, MA seeks a senior leader to own the foundation and world-model stack for autonomous flight software. You will mentor engineers, shape architecture, and ensure interfaces to the autonomy stack are deterministic and verifiable.

You will drive evaluation, uncertainty quantification, and rigorous benchmarking against rule-based systems, while coordinating with certification and systems engineering for safe deployment.

Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or related subject.
• 8+ years building AI systems, with 3+ years leading technical teams or owning a major model program.
• Proven team management experience shipping AI-powered models into production.
• Ownership of a learned system that shipped into a physical, real-time product.
• Depth in world models and/or learned dynamics; planning or control; post-training methods.
• Rigorous evaluation practice and ability to explain metric improvements vs. regressions.
• Strong PyTorch; comfortable with real-time C++ systems.
• Clear technical communication to engineers, safety engineers, and regulators.

Responsibilities

• Technical strategy: own foundation and world-model work and roadmap.
• Team leadership: mentor a small team of world-model engineers; set the technical bar.
• System interface: design deterministic model interfaces to the autonomy stack.
• Evaluation: define success metrics; build evaluation harness and regression suite.
• Safety outputs: establish uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection.
• Benchmarking: compare learned planning with rule-based planning across mission profiles.
• Certification partnership: work with engineering, certification, and regulatory teams.
• Research judgment: track external frontier and make disciplined adoption decisions.

Skills

Team leadership

PyTorch

C++ RT systems

Model evaluation

Architecture design

Post-training

Python

Safety-critical

Communication

Education

BSc in CS/AI

Tools

C++ real-time systems

ROS

Job description

Merlin Labs in Boston, MA seeks a senior leader to own the foundation and world-model stack for autonomous flight software. You will mentor engineers, shape architecture, and ensure interfaces to the autonomy stack are deterministic and verifiable.

You will drive evaluation, uncertainty quantification, and rigorous benchmarking against rule-based systems, while coordinating with certification and systems engineering for safe deployment.