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.

Jeppesen ForeFlight is seeking a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to help build and scale domain-specialized automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for aviation and operational audio workflows. This role focuses on developing vertical ASR models optimized for high-accuracy transcription in noisy, safety-critical environments, including aviation communications, cockpit interactions, operational dispatch, maintenance coordination, and related specialized audio domains.

You will work across the full ML lifecycle — data engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, and optimization — to deliver production-grade speech intelligence capabilities integrated into ForeFlight and broader aviation platforms.

This position is ideal for someone with deep expertise in speech AI, acoustic modeling, large-scale transcription pipelines, and domain adaptation techniques for specialized vocabularies and constrained communication environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, train, and optimize domain-specific ASR models for aviation and operational communications.
• Develop verticalized speech models tuned 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.
• Improve 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.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Electrical Engineering, Linguistics, or 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.

Preferred Qualifications

• 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.

Why Join Us 

At Jeppesen ForeFlight, we know you want a rewarding career. To do that, you need challenging projects, a good work environment, and awesome coworkers. We believe in our employees, and we empower them to make a direct impact on our products and services. We strive to provide our employees with a world-class benefits experience, focused on supporting their physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing. Our benefits package includes but is not limited to the following:

• 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

Pay is based upon candidate experience and qualifications, as well market and business considerations: Summary Pay Range: $208,000-$255,000

Jeppesen ForeFlight - EOE including Disability/Vets | Pay Transparency | E-Verify Participant | Equal Opportunity Employer