Data Loop Pipeline Engineer

About the Role

Responsibilities

• Build and operate ingestion pipelines for flight-test, simulation, and operational data.
• Normalize data formats, align time across sources, and validate quality at ingestion gates.
• Implement dataset curation and versioning with full data lineage.
• Automate mining and triage of anomalies, system disagreements, and near-boundary events.
• Own labeling workflows and tooling, including quality control and inter-annotator agreement.
• Instrument deployed behavior so operational signals reach the next training cycle.
• Collaborate on logging, instrumentation, and third-party data access constraints.
• Monitor pipeline health and dataset coverage for drift, gaps, and silent breakage.

Required Qualifications

• Degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related field.
• 3+ years of data engineering experience owning production pipelines for ML training.
• Strong Python and SQL skills with data modeling, storage format, and processing framework knowledge.
• Experience with dataset versioning and lineage tooling.
• Comfort with high-volume time-series and multimodal sensor data.

Nice to Have

• Robotics, autonomous vehicle, or aerospace data experience.
• Familiarity with flight data formats and avionics bus data.
• Experience building internal engineering tools.
• Data governance or provenance work in a regulated environment.

Workplace

• This position is based on-site at Merlin headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary range is USD 125,000 to USD 220,000 per year.
• Competitive equity grants are part of the total compensation package.
• Benefits include health, dental, life insurance, unlimited vacation, and a 401(k) match.