Staff Engineer (World Model Development)

Join Merlin, a cutting-edge aerospace technology company, as a Staff Engineer specializing in World Model Development. In this role, you will design, train, and evaluate predictive models of aircraft and their environments, contributing to the advancement of autonomous flight technology. You will own the learned predictive models, build the rollout machinery for evaluating candidate plans, and rigorously characterize model validity boundaries. This position offers equity in the company, flexible paid time off, comprehensive healthcare, parental leave, a lifestyle spending account, and a 401K program.

• Conception, training, and evaluation of world models that predict the evolution of aircraft state, environment, and other traffic.
• Ownership of the learned predictive models of the aircraft, its environment, and other actors, as well as the rollout machinery that turns those models into evaluated candidate futures.
• Collaboration with the Data/Sim team to work on the sim-to-real gap in both directions, including training in simulation, validating against flight data, and feeding discrepancies back into simulator fidelity.

• Strong PyTorch and a solid grasp of the training stack — distributed training, mixed precision, experiment tracking, debugging a run that has silently gone wrong
• Comfort with messy real-world sensor and telemetry data
• Degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related subject
• Demonstrated rigor in evaluation and uncertainty quantification
• Working knowledge of dynamical systems, state estimation or control; you can read a flight dynamics model and know what your network is and is not replacing
• 10+ years building and training deep learning models, with meaningful work on sequence, dynamics, video or trajectory prediction
• Model-based RL, latent dynamics models or learned simulators
• Experience with trajectory prediction in autonomous driving or robotics
• Multimodal fusion across vision, state and structured mission context
• Aerospace background: flight dynamics, aircraft performance or air traffic