Senior ML Engineer II — Space Optics & CV

Rocket Lab; Long Beach (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 229,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grant

Company stock

Employee Stock Purchase Program

Medical plans

Dental and vision

Job summary

Rocket Lab seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer II for its Optical Systems division in Long Beach, CA. You will build deep learning models for challenge-rich EO/IR image processing and collaborate across research teams to advance space domain sensing capabilities.

You’ll deploy ML solutions, prototype rapidly, and work under program requirements for national security, with equity and a comprehensive benefits package as part of total compensation.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 8+ years of experience; master’s or Ph.D. preferred.
• Strong fundamentals in math and ML; model selection, training, deployment.
• Experience with CNNs for vision, object detection, segmentation, tracking.
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning libraries (Keras, TF, PyTorch).
• Software engineering basics: version control, testing, CI/CD, containerization.
• US citizenship required; ability to obtain US government security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Develop computer vision algorithms and deep neural networks for image/video processing.
• Collaborate with researchers/engineers on AI/ML/computer vision projects.
• Scale training/validation data with physics-based simulation frameworks.
• Design, train, and deploy ML models for Optical Systems applications.
• Prototype rapidly and integrate solutions into operational systems.
• Troubleshoot, fix bugs, and maintain systems.
• Stay updated with ML research and evaluate new tools/frameworks.

Skills

Python

ML fundamentals

Problem solving

Collaboration

Security clearance readiness

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/EE/Physics

Master's or PhD preferred

Tools

Keras

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Docker

Git

CI/CD

Job description

Rocket Lab seeks a Senior Machine Learning Engineer II for its Optical Systems division in Long Beach, CA. You will build deep learning models for challenge-rich EO/IR image processing and collaborate across research teams to advance space domain sensing capabilities.

You’ll deploy ML solutions, prototype rapidly, and work under program requirements for national security, with equity and a comprehensive benefits package as part of total compensation.