ML/AI Founding Engineer

About the role

This is a founding AI/ML role. You'll own the intelligence layer that sits at the core of everything Navi does - from audio diarization and speech recognition to maneuver detection, safety event classification, and automated debrief generation. The data is messy, multimodal, and high-stakes. Cockpit audio is mono with overlapping speakers. Avionics telemetry arrives in dozens of formats. ATC comms bleed into crew conversation. Your job is to make machines understand all of it - and get it right, because the output goes directly to pilots, instructors, and military operators. Navi is deployed at Embry-Riddle, Purdue, UND, Sling Pilot Academy, and the United States Air Force. Your models are already in production. This isn't research - it's AI that flies.

Responsibilities

• Build and improve the ML systems that power Navi's automated flight debrief - maneuver detection, performance scoring, safety event identification
• Develop and refine audio intelligence pipelines - speaker diarization, speech-to-text, cockpit audio separation, ATC communication extraction
• Design the AI reasoning layer that synthesizes avionics data, audio, and ADS-B into coherent sortie narratives
• Build evaluation frameworks and feedback loops that continuously improve model accuracy against real-world CFI assessments
• Work directly with pilots and instructors to ground-truth model outputs and close the gap between what the AI sees and what actually happened in the aircraft
• Push the boundary on what's possible with LLMs in safety-critical, domain-specific applications
• About you
• 5+ years of professional experience in machine learning, AI, or applied research - with production systems, not just papers
• Deep expertise in at least one of: NLP/speech processing, audio ML, time-series analysis, or multimodal reasoning
• Experience building and deploying ML pipelines end to end - data ingestion, model training, evaluation, inference, and monitoring in production
• Strong engineering fundamentals - you can build the infrastructure your models need, not just the models
• You've worked with messy, real-world data and know how to build systems that are robust to noise, edge cases, and domain drift
• Experience with LLMs - fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, or building LLM-powered applications
• You ship. You don't wait for a perfect dataset or a clean abstraction. You build, evaluate, iterate, and improve
• Comfortable operating with high autonomy in a fast-moving environment where the problem definition evolves weekly

Requirements

• Familiarity with aviation systems, flight training operations, or defense technology environments
• Experience with audio diarization, speaker separation, or cockpit/radio audio processing
• Background in safety-critical ML systems where model accuracy has real-world consequences
• Why this role matters
• What you'll get
• Early-stage equity - real ownership in a category-defining company
• Flight training - earn your pilot's license and build with true domain expertise
• Impact you can see - your work will be used by pilots, flight schools, airlines, and the U.S. Air Force
• A role that scales into technical leadership as we grow
• How we work
• Find a way. We don't wait for permission or perfect information. Ideas come from anywhere regardless of title. Figure it out, ship it, iterate.
• Creativity over control. First principles over process. We'd rather have a creative solution that's 80% right today than a perfect one next quarter.
• Update fast. Come in with a hypothesis, throw it away when the data says otherwise. Ego has no place here.
• Intensity with focus. We work hard because the mission demands it. Clarity on what matters is how we make that sustainable.

Benefits

Additional Information

Navi captures everything a pilot sees and hears and turns it into automated debrief intelligence. You're building the AI that makes sense of it all - the models that listen to cockpit audio, identify maneuvers, attribute instructor vs. student behavior, and generate debrief reports that match what a seasoned CFI would catch.

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