Data Loop Pipeline Engineer

Summary

Merlin is an aerospace and defense company building autonomous flight systems for commercial and defense aviation. The Data Loop Pipeline Engineer will own data infrastructure that transforms flight and simulation outputs into trustworthy, versioned training datasets and feeds operational behavior back into future training cycles. The role includes building ingestion, curation, labeling, monitoring, and data quality workflows for multimodal aviation data.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate ingestion pipelines for flight test, simulation and operational data, including format normalization, time alignment across sources, and quality validation at the gate
• Implement dataset curation and versioning with full lineage: what went into a dataset, from where, processed how, and by which version of which tool
• Build automated mining and triage for the rare and interesting — anomalies, disagreements between learned and rule-based systems, near-boundary events — so the flywheel prioritizes signal over volume
• Own labeling workflows and tooling, including quality control and inter-annotator agreement where human labeling is involved
• Close the loop: instrument deployed-system behavior so that operational signal reliably reaches the next training cycle without manual shepherding
• Work with Flight Test & Operations on logging and instrumentation requirements, and help resolve access constraints where data is captured by third-party systems
• Monitor pipeline health and dataset coverage; alert on drift, gaps and silent breakage

Skills

• Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related subject
• 3+ years in data engineering, with production ownership of pipelines feeding ML training
• Strong Python and SQL; solid grasp of data modeling, storage formats and processing frameworks
• Experience with dataset versioning and lineage tooling
• Comfort with high-volume time-series and multimodal sensor data — telemetry, video, audio, structured logs
• Care about correctness
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future
• Robotics, autonomous vehicle or aerospace data experience
• Familiarity with flight data formats and avionics bus data
• Experience building internal tools that engineers actually chose to use
• Data governance or provenance work in a regulated environment

Qualifications

Must Haves

• Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related subject
• 3+ years in data engineering, with production ownership of pipelines feeding ML training
• Strong Python and SQL; solid grasp of data modeling, storage formats and processing frameworks
• Experience with dataset versioning and lineage tooling
• Comfort with high-volume time-series and multimodal sensor data — telemetry, video, audio, structured logs
• Care about correctness
• Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for visa sponsorship now or in the future

Nice to Haves

• Robotics, autonomous vehicle or aerospace data experience
• Familiarity with flight data formats and avionics bus data
• Experience building internal tools that engineers actually chose to use
• Data governance or provenance work in a regulated environment

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Dental insurance
• Life insurance
• Flexible paid time off
• 401k with match
• Work/life integration
• Professional development support
• Remote work option
• Hybrid work schedule at the Boston, MA headquarters