Senior Manager, AI Foundation Model

Quiet Capital; San Francisco (CA); Remote; 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 the United States seeks a seasoned AI/ML leader to own the foundation and world-model work, shaping architecture, post-training strategy, and the capability roadmap for autonomy.

You will mentor a small team of world-model and post-training engineers, define interfaces to the autonomy stack, and establish evaluation, safety, and certification partnership practices across engineering, safety, and regulators.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building AI systems with 3+ years leading technical teams.
• Proven ownership of learned systems deployed in real-time products.
• Strong PyTorch experience and ability to read C++ real-time code.
• Clear written communication for regulators and engineers.

Responsibilities

• Technical strategy: own foundation and world-model work and roadmap.
• Lead and mentor a small team of world-model engineers.
• Design model interfaces to the autonomy stack with deterministic verification.
• Define evaluation harnesses, taxonomy, and regression suites.
• Establish uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection.
• Benchmark learned vs rule-based planning across mission profiles.
• Collaborate with Certification and Systems Engineering to stay defensible.
• Monitor external research and decide what to adopt or ignore.

Skills

Leadership

PyTorch

C++ RTS

Architecture design

Education

Degree in CS/AI or related

Tools

PyTorch

C++

Job description

Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.

About You:

• You have built learned decision-making systems that left the lab and ran on real hardware with real consequences.
• You are fluent in modern model architecture and post-training, but you are not a benchmark chaser — you have been in the room when a learned system was asked to justify itself to people who sign off on safety, and you know the difference between a model that performs well and a model whose behavior you can characterize.
• You want to work on a problem where “it works most of the time” is not a result.

Responsibilities:

• Technical strategy: own Merlin's foundation and world-model work — architecture selection, build-vs-adapt decisions, post-training approach, and the capability roadmap that supports it.
• Team leadership: lead and mentor a small team of world-model and post-training engineers; set the technical bar and the review culture for model work across AI Core.
• System interface: design the model interface to the rest of the autonomy stack — structured, schema-constrained plan outputs that a deterministic verifier can accept or reject, never free-form actuator authority.
• Evaluation: define what “good” means before training begins — build the evaluation harness, capability taxonomy, and regression suite that gate every model release, in partnership with the Data/Sim/Release pillar.
• Safety-relevant outputs: establish uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection as first-class model outputs, not afterthoughts — downstream safety monitoring depends on them.
• Benchmarking: deliver an honest, reproducible comparison between learned planning and Merlin's current rule-based behavior planning across representative mission profiles, including the cases where the learned approach loses.
• Certification partnership: work with Systems Engineering, Certification, and the Chief Architect to keep model design inside what is defensible to a regulator, and to shape what “defensible” will mean for learned components.
• Research judgment: track the external research frontier and make disciplined calls about what Merlin adopts, builds, or ignores.

Qualifications:

• Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related subject.
• 8+ years building AI systems, with 3+ years leading technical teams or owning a major model program.
• Proven team management experience shipping high-tech, AI-powered models into production — hiring and developing AI engineers, setting technical direction and priorities, and owning delivery from research through deployment.
• Demonstrated ownership of a learned system that shipped into a physical, real-time product — robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, or industrial autonomy.
• Depth in at least two of: world models and learned dynamics; sequence models applied to planning or control; post-training (SFT, preference optimization, RL fine-tuning); structured or constrained generation.
• Rigorous evaluation practice: you have built eval harnesses that caught regressions before customers did, and you can explain why a model's aggregate metric improved while a specific behavior got worse.
• Strong PyTorch; comfortable reading and reasoning about the C++ real-time systems your models feed.
• You write clearly. Architecture decisions here get read by systems engineers, safety engineers, and regulators — not only by other AI engineers.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with learned components in a certified or regulated product (DO-178C, ISO 26262, IEC 62304).
• Background in classical planning, behavior trees, MCTS, or hierarchical task networks — you'll be replacing and interoperating with exactly these.
• Familiarity with aviation domain structure: flight phases, ARINC 424 procedures, ATC phraseology.
• Publications or open-source contributions in embodied AI, world models, or robot learning.

Logistics:

• We welcome remote applicants for this role, with a preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to Boston, MA for a hybrid work schedule at our HQ.

Merlin Labs offers an innovative, entrepreneurial, and team-focused startup environment. We also offer a top-notch benefits package (health, dental, life, unlimited vacation, and 401k with match) and work/life integration. Being part of the Merlin team allows you to become part of a small team that supports professional development while working together to achieve our mission.

Merlin Labs is an equal opportunity employer and values diversity. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy), gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, military service or obligation or disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law. All job offers are contingent upon the candidate passing background and reference checks.

At this time, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship or consider candidates who require visa transfers. Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future.

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification form upon hire.

If you require reasonable accommodation in completing an application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please direct your inquiries to: [e-mail]

Merlin Labs does not accept unsolicited resumes from any source other than directly from candidates.

230000 - 330000 USD a year

The compensation range provided is reflective of base salary only, and is a good-faith estimate based on a wide range of factors. The actual offer will be determined by a variety of factors including the candidate's qualifications, skills, experience, education, and training. Highly competitive equity grants are considered part of Merlin's total compensation package. Additionally, Merlin offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees.