Senior Data Scientist

Archer • San Jose, CA

17d • $145,000 - $180,000

About The Position

Archer is hiring a Senior Data Scientist for its AI Products organization, which builds consumer software for the general aviation industry. The role turns raw aviation data into intelligence for Archer’s AI platform, working with high-frequency aircraft telemetry and noisy air traffic control audio to infer operational and physical activity in the sky. The products are already shipping and used daily; this role is not part of Archer’s Midnight aircraft program.

The Senior Data Scientist will develop and evaluate models across time-series, spatial, and noisy unstructured sequential data. They will create evaluation approaches for problems with little or no labeled ground truth, collaborate with aviation subject-matter experts to translate operational knowledge into data features and evaluation criteria, and work with backend and platform engineers to put models into production streaming pipelines and oversee their behavior after deployment. The AI Products organization is roughly 100 people and expects to grow substantially over the next year.

The targeted base pay is $145,000–$180,000. Actual compensation depends on job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Certain positions may be eligible for visa sponsorship. Archer provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities and sincerely held religious beliefs.

Requirements

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Aerospace Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• At least 2 years of applied data science or machine learning experience, including models that have run in production.
• Strong Python skills and strong SQL skills over large analytical datasets.
• Depth in time-series and sequence modeling.
• Experience with sparse, incomplete, or unlabeled data, including weak supervision, programmatic labeling, and building evaluation sets where ground truth does not exist.
• Experience designing data validation and drift detection for continuously arriving data.
• Ability to leverage AI assistants while fully understanding and taking ownership of models, features, and analyses.
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative mindset.

Nice To Haves

• Prior experience or a deep interest in aerospace, aviation, or high-throughput tracking systems.
• Familiarity with flight telemetry, ATC phraseology, or airspace procedures.
• Familiarity with geographic and spatial data processing, including projections, spatial indexing, and great-circle geometry.
• Awareness of distributed messaging and stream-processing systems such as Apache Pulsar, Kafka, or Apache Flink, and columnar or lakehouse analytical storage.

Responsibilities

• Derive new signals from high-throughput, real-time data streams to infer complex physical and operational states not directly observable in raw telemetry.
• Build, evaluate, and iterate on models across dense time-series, spatial data, and noisy, unstructured sequential data.
• Design evaluation for problems with little or no labeled ground truth, using weak supervision and programmatic labeling, and defend those definitions to engineers and domain experts.
• Partner with backend and platform engineers to take models from offline analysis into production streaming pipelines and own model behavior once live.
• Work directly with aviation subject-matter experts to turn operational knowledge into features, labels, and evaluation criteria.
• Design data validation and drift detection for continuously arriving data.
• Use AI assistants to increase velocity while understanding and taking ownership of every model, feature, and analysis shipped.
• Explain methodology and its limitations to non-specialist audiences.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior