- Robot type
- Drone · Defense
- Location
- BostonMassachusettsUSA
- Job type
- Artificial Intelligence
- Posted
- Sep 17, 2026
- Salary
- $125,000–$220,000 a year
Full-time
Data Loop Pipeline Engineer
Job description
Merlin Labs — Data Loop Pipeline Engineer (Boston, Massachusetts · San Francisco, California (Remote OK)).
Job 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.
Job requirements
- You think data infrastructure is a craft. You have built pipelines that ran unattended for months and you have felt the specific satisfaction of a dataset that is exactly what it claims to be.
- You will own the machinery that turns flight and simulation output into trustworthy, versioned, traceable training data — and turns deployed behavior back into the next training set.
- 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. In this role a quiet data bug becomes a model behavior nobody can explain.
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