Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Jeppesen ForeFlight builds industry-leading aviation software used by pilots, aircraft operators, and major airlines worldwide. As a high-growth, private equity-backed company, we are focused on scaling our operations, strengthening our financial infrastructure, and driving operational excellence across the business. Our team combines deep domain expertise with a collaborative, high-performance culture to solve complex challenges and support continued growth.

Introduction

Jeppesen ForeFlight is a leading aviation software company that builds tools for pilots, aircraft operators, and major airlines worldwide. As a high-growth, private equity-backed company, we are scaling our operations, enhancing financial infrastructure, and driving operational excellence. Our team combines deep domain expertise with a collaborative, high-performance culture to solve complex challenges and support continued growth.

We are looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to develop and scale domain-specialized Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for aviation and operational audio workflows. This role involves creating vertical ASR models optimized for high-accuracy transcription in noisy, safety-critical aviation environments, including communications, cockpit interactions, and maintenance coordination.

Responsibilities

• Design, train, and optimize domain-specific ASR models for aviation and operational communications.
• Develop verticalized speech models adjusted for specialized terminology, accents, abbreviations, call signs, and noisy radio/audio conditions.
• Build and maintain large-scale transcription and labeling pipelines for supervised and semi-supervised learning workflows.
• Fine-tune foundation speech models (e.g., Whisper, wav2vec, Conformer, RNN-T, Citrinet, NeMo-based architectures) for aviation-specific use cases.
• Enhance transcription quality through language model adaptation, pronunciation lexicons, contextual biasing, and decoding optimization.
• Develop evaluation frameworks and benchmarking methodologies using WER, CER, domain entity accuracy, latency, and robustness metrics.
• Collaborate with product, avionics, data engineering, and platform teams to deploy scalable real-time and batch transcription systems.
• Optimize inference pipelines for edge, cloud, and low-latency streaming environments.
• Research emerging techniques in speech enhancement, diarization, speaker adaptation, multilingual ASR, and audio foundation models.
• Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and operational reliability standards required in aviation environments.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, or a related field.
• 3+ years of experience in speech recognition, audio ML, or applied machine learning.
• Strong experience training and fine-tuning ASR models using frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with modern ASR architectures including: Transformer-based ASR, Conformer, RNN-T, CTC-based systems, Encoder-decoder speech models.
• Experience working with: Speech/audio preprocessing, Forced alignment, Language model adaptation, Beam search decoding, Noise robustness techniques.
• Familiarity with NVIDIA NeMo, Kaldi, ESPnet, Hugging Face, Whisper, DeepSpeed, or equivalent ecosystems.
• Strong Python engineering skills and experience building production ML systems.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and ML deployment workflows (AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD).
• Ability to work with large audio datasets and distributed training environments.

Nice to Have

• Experience building ASR systems for aviation, air traffic control, public safety, defense, or other mission-critical domains.
• Familiarity with VHF/UHF radio communications and noisy-channel audio processing.
• Experience with multilingual or code-switching ASR systems.
• Background in speech enhancement, keyword spotting, diarization, or speaker verification.
• Knowledge of LLM-assisted transcription correction and retrieval-augmented speech systems.
• Experience optimizing models for real-time streaming inference.
• Active pilot experience or familiarity with aviation operations is a plus.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision insurance with employer-paid health premiums.
• Open PTO Policy.
• 401(k) with up to 10% company matching and immediate vesting.
• 12 weeks paid maternity leave.
• 4 weeks paid paternity leave.
• Flight training rewards.

About Company

Jeppesen ForeFlight builds industry-leading aviation software used by pilots, aircraft operators, and major airlines worldwide. As a high-growth, private equity-backed company, we are focused on scaling our operations, strengthening our financial infrastructure, and driving operational excellence across the business. Our team combines deep domain expertise with a collaborative, high-performance culture to solve complex challenges and support continued growth.

How to Apply

Apply via the provided application link.