Senior Software Engineer, ML Systems Evaluation

Founded in 2015, Acubed is the Silicon Valley innovation center of Airbus. As a global leader in aerospace, Airbus aims to make things fly. Our mission is to provide a lens into the future for the industry, transforming risk into opportunity to build the future of flight now.

At Acubed, we strive to propel innovation to market faster, broaden the talent pool in emerging aerospace careers and simultaneously help drive a culture change across Airbus.

WAYFINDER

Our Wayfinder team is building scalable, certifiable autonomy systems to power the next generation of commercial aircraft. Our team of experts is driving the maturation of machine learning and other core technologies for autonomous flight; we are creating a reference architecture that includes hardware, software, and a data-driven development process to allow aircraft to perceive and react to their environment. Autonomous flight is transforming the transportation industry, and our team is at the heart of this revolution.

The Opportunity/Role Description

As a Senior Software Engineer, ML Systems Evaluation on the Wayfinder team, you will play a critical role in developing and validating safety-critical AI-based systems that empower commercial aircraft to perceive, understand, and react to their surroundings in real-time. Your focus will be on developing, maintaining, and refining the evaluation framework and pipeline used to measure model accuracy, robustness, and real-world behavior in the complex, safety-critical world of commercial aviation. 

Your primary responsibility will be to lead and contribute to the design, development, and implementation of the testing pipelines that assess model predictions on real and synthetic data, helping us identify, analyze, and resolve failure modes. This role requires strong software engineering fundamentals, as well as familiarity with modern pipeline architecture and tooling. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams of AI/ML experts, data engineers, and system architects to develop and execute comprehensive testing strategies, ensuring the highest levels of trust and confidence in our AI solutions.

You'll lead the design of automated evaluation pipelines that assess model predictions on real and synthetic image data taken from aircraft during landing approaches, helping us identify, analyze, and resolve failure modes.

Responsibilities 

• Lead the development of robust and scalable model evaluation frameworks for AI systems used in safety-critical environments.
• Execute rigorous verification and validation strategies to ensure AI systems meet aviation certification standards.
• Collaborate with systems engineers, AI/ML researchers and data engineers to develop tests, test, analyze, and improve the performance, robustness, and reliability of neural networks and other AI models.
• Build automated testing pipelines to evaluate AI system behavior under a wide range of operational conditions, ensuring they perform safely and reliably in real-world scenarios.
• Develop tools and metrics to assess the generalization, accuracy, and failure modes of AI models, identifying areas for improvement through better data sets, feature engineering, or architecture modifications.
• Work closely with the systems and certification teams to ensure the AI systems meet all performance, embeddability and compliance requirements.
• Conduct code reviews and mentor junior engineers to ensure best practices in testing, documentation, and code quality.
• Stay informed about advancements in AI safety testing, aviation standards, and certification processes, and help shape the testing strategies for future AI-based aviation systems.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field
• Master’s Degree: 7 or more years of relevant experience
• Bachelor’s Degree: 9 or more years of relevant experience
• Proficiency in Python and experience with automation tools and CI/CD pipelines.
• Familiarity with testing methodologies for neural networks.
• Demonstrated ability to work in a collaborative, cross-functional environment.
• Strong problem-solving skills and a commitment to quality and safety.
• Strong sense of ownership.

Strong Plus

• Experience with evaluation of ML models.
• Experience developing evaluation frameworks. 

Nice to have

• Familiarity with:
• MLOps tools such as MLFlow, DVC, Weights and Biases, or similar
• Workflow orchestration tools (e.g. Dagster, Airflow, Dagster, Prefect)
• Containerization tools (e.g. Docker)
• ML/AI frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.) 
• Knowledge of AI safety concerns, including adversarial attacks, robustness, explainability, and uncertainty estimation.
• Experience in developing safety-critical systems for the aviation industry or other highly regulated sectors (e.g., automotive or healthcare).
• Experience with cloud platforms and distributed testing environments.
• Strong understanding of data collection, augmentation, and synthetic data generation to improve testing outcomes.

Compensation:

The estimated salary range for this position is $171,000 to $190,000 annually.  Enjoy comprehensive benefits: health insurance, paid time off, holidays, 401(k), Flexible Spending Account, Health Savings Account, Airbus Employee Share Ownership Plan, flight training, and more.

Experience flexibility with our hybrid work model, which includes three days in the office to foster collaboration and innovation while allowing for remote work options. Additionally, employees can work remotely—inside or outside the U.S.—for up to 31 days per year. 

Why Join Us?

Be a part of a dynamic team that values creativity, collaboration, innovation and problem solving.  At Acubed, your contributions will directly impact our digital future.  We welcome diverse perspectives and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment.

Acubed is committed to creating a fair and equitable workplace for all. We seek applicants of all backgrounds and identities, across race, color, ethnicity, national origin or ancestry, age, citizenship, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or parental status, or disability. Applicants will not be discriminated against based on these or other protected categories or social identities.

Acubed Requirements

All job offers at Acubed are contingent upon the candidate passing references, background and export control checks.

* Please Note that Acubed does not offer sponsorship of employment-based nonimmigrant visa petitions for this role.