[Remote] Senior Data Platform Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Nxt Level is recruiting for a company building advanced sonar and sensing systems that provide real-time intelligence for the maritime domain. The Senior Software Engineer, Data Platform will build and operate the real-time ML data platform supporting autonomous and semi-autonomous marine systems, including pipelines for processing, labeling, reprocessing, and analyzing multi-sensor data. The role will also establish data quality, lineage, versioning, reproducibility, APIs, and performance standards while partnering with ML, perception, hardware, and product teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate a real-time ML data platform for autonomous and semi-autonomous marine systems
• Define how raw maritime signals become clean, consistent, labeled datasets for perception and foundation models
• Build post-processing pipelines that align, resample, and calibrate multi-sensor data
• Create robust backfill and reprocessing frameworks for historical data
• Apply new filters, synchronizations, label corrections, and metadata enrichments across large datasets
• Establish lineage, versioning, and reproducibility standards for ML experiments
• Build dataset discovery and access APIs/SDKs for downstream users
• Enable teams to query datasets by time, region, modality, labels, and quality flags
• Instrument data quality metrics across completeness, corruption, drift, label density, class balance, and regional coverage
• Build dashboards, alerts, and canary dataset builds to improve data reliability
• Optimize storage layouts for fast reads, parallelization, compression, chunking, sharding, locality, and prefetching
• Partner closely with ML, perception, hardware, and product teams to map data contracts to model needs

Skills

• Strong experience building data platforms, ML infrastructure, or large-scale data processing systems
• Experience owning dataset quality, reproducibility, lineage, and evaluation fidelity
• Strong Python experience and comfort with modern data tooling
• Experience with tools such as PyArrow, Polars, Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, or similar libraries
• Experience working with audio, vision, telemetry, sensor, or time-series data
• Strong understanding of data pipelines, dataset versioning, metadata, and quality monitoring
• Experience building APIs, SDKs, or access layers for data discovery and consumption
• Ability to design systems that support both real-time and historical reprocessing workflows
• Comfort working closely with ML, perception, hardware, and product teams
• Strong ownership, technical judgment, and ability to operate in a fast-moving startup environment
• Experience owning “dataset-as-a-product” systems used across multiple model families
• Experience building curated corpora with strong lineage, documentation, and reproducibility
• Experience designing dataset splitting or sampling strategies by time, platform, geography, class, signal quality, or similar dimensions
• Experience preventing data leakage and improving model generalization through thoughtful dataset design
• Hands-on experience with labeling workflows, ontologies, consensus systems, QA, or label-store integrations
• Experience with Go, Rust, or TypeScript for services
• Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow or Prefect
• Experience with metadata and lineage tools such as MLflow or Weights & Biases
• Exposure to edge or sensor data, including audio, sonar, video, telemetry, time synchronization, or geospatial context
• Experience in defense, maritime, autonomy, robotics, aerospace, or national security technology

Benefits

• Long-term equity incentive program with significant growth potential
• Flexible PTO and paid holidays
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
• 401(k)
• Lunch and snacks provided in office
• Remote work in the United States or onsite in Los Angeles, CA

Company Overview