Senior AI/ML Scientist, Planetary Science

About the role

We are seeking an AI/ML Scientist to develop and deploy machine learning systems that unlock new science from our interplanetary mission. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of frontier AI methods and planetary science.

Responsibilities

• Develop and apply Machine Learning techniques to combine Earth-derived atmospheric datasets and known Martian atmospheric physics to create a weather forecasting model to be run on the spacecraft at Mars with real-time collected data as the input.
• Optimize the weather forecasting model to run on the spacecraft at Mars.
• Develop and build methods that reconstruct coherent 3D representations by integrating complementary datasets of 2D surface images, 3D surface models, geologic mapping of units, and radar depth soundings, each having different geometry, resolution, temporal cadence and past and new data.
• Build systems that monitor observations, analyze them in real-time on the spacecraft and detect scientifically significant events based on known phenomenology of Mars as well as novelty detection.
• Develop the AI decision-making layer that closes the loop, autonomously re-tasking the spacecraft to acquire follow-up observations from onboard inference on flight hardware.

Requirements

• PhD in machine learning, computer science, physics, or a related technical field, and 3+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Demonstrated experience with transfer learning, domain adaptation or model fine-tuning, particularly in low-data or out-of-distribution settings.
• Working knowledge of multi-modal data fusion.
• Excited to collaborate with a diverse group of scientists and engineers, and further planetary science.

Qualifications

• Experience with applying machine learning in physical datasets.

Skills

• Strong programming skills in Python, C++, or similar languages.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Keras.
• Knowledge of statistical analysis and data visualization tools.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity.
• A generous PTO and sick leave policy.
• Parental leave.
• An annual learning and development stipend.

Pay

Hiring Range: $154,000—$230,000 USD

Schedule

Full-time