AI/ML Engineer

Darwin Space are currently hiring for an AI/ML Engineer on behalf of a business in Toulouse.

About the Role

They are an AI/ML Engineer to build and deploy learning-driven capabilities within their autonomous space systems. In this role, you’ll create models that directly operate in closed-loop autonomy, supporting perception, navigation, and decision-making in real mission environments. This is a hands-on position for engineers who want their models running on real spacecraft, not just evaluated in offline experiments.

Job Description

* Design, train, and validate AI/ML models supporting satellite autonomy, including rendezvous and proximity operations, on-orbit inspection, formation flying, and space domain awareness.

* Develop learning-based components for guidance, navigation, perception, and decision-making, such as pose estimation, anomaly detection, behavior recognition, and trajectory generation.

* Build LLM- and VLM-powered tools to enable intuitive satellite operations, including natural language command interfaces and visual scene understanding.

* Create and maintain synthetic data generation pipelines that model realistic orbital dynamics, sensor behavior, lighting conditions, and uncertainty, using domain randomization and sim-to-real techniques.

* Extend and improve simulation environments used for training, verification, stress testing, and adversarial evaluation of autonomy models.

* Optimize models for flight deployment, applying techniques such as quantization, pruning, batching, and real-time inference on limited onboard compute.

* Integrate ML components into flight software using well-structured Python and C++ interfaces, with strong safeguards and fallback behaviors.

* Participate in software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop testing, closing the feedback loop between simulation, sensors, control systems, and model improvements.

* Take full ownership of your models, from early experimentation and training pipelines to testing, review, deployment, and long-term maintenance.

Requirements

* Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, reinforcement learning, or a related technical discipline.

* Practical experience developing, training, and evaluating ML models for perception, estimation, planning, or control systems.

* Proficiency with modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, and the ability to integrate models into Python and C++ systems.

* Experience building simulation tools or data generation pipelines to support ML development.

* Ability to design, debug, and scale training workflows, including dataset management, distributed training, and evaluation.

* Familiarity with deploying ML inference as part of larger autonomous or robotic software stacks.

* A sense of ownership, adaptability in fast-paced environments, and clear communication around technical tradeoffs.

Darwin Recruitment is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.

Sebastian Prins