Senior Manager, AI Foundation Model

About Merlin: Merlin (NASDAQ: MRLN) is a publicly traded aerospace and defense company building a non-human pilot to deliver full-stack autonomy for any aircraft from takeoff to touchdown. The Merlin Pilot autonomy system powers a growing range of aircraft and mission profiles and has been proven through hundreds of autonomous flights from Merlin's global flight test facilities, including Kerikeri, New Zealand; Quonset Point, Rhode Island; and soon, Bedford, Massachusetts. Headquartered in Boston, Merlin is expanding its organization to accelerate the development and deployment of its autonomy platform, helping customers solve some of aviation's most pressing challenges, from pilot shortages to improving flight safety. Backed by some of the world's leading investors prior to its public listing, Merlin continues to advance the certification and commercialization of autonomous flight across commercial and defense aviation.  About You:  You have built learned decision-making systems that left the lab and ran on real hardware with real consequences. You are fluent in modern model architecture and post-training, but you are not a benchmark chaser — you have been in the room when a learned system was asked to justify itself to people who sign off on safety, and you know the difference between a model that performs well and a model whose behavior you can characterize. You want to work on a problem where “it works most of the time” is not a result.