Senior Data Scientist

About the role

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, California, Archer is a leader in the next-gen aerospace sector building an end-to-end advanced air mobility platform that delivers air taxis, unmanned aircraft systems ("UAS"), aviation-related physical artificial intelligence ("AI") solutions, and other technologies to customers worldwide across the commercial aerospace and defense sectors.

Our sights are set high and our problems are hard, and we believe that diversity in the workplace is what makes us smarter, drives better insights, and will ultimately lift us all to success. We are dedicated to cultivating an equitable and inclusive environment that embraces our differences, and supports and celebrates all of our team members.

Archer is best known for Midnight, our electric aircraft. This role isn't on that program. The AI Products Org builds consumer software for the general aviation industry. There's a lot we're not ready to talk about publicly yet, so this posting stays vague on purpose. What we can say: the products are real, they ship, and people use them every day.

As a Senior Data Scientist here, you'll be the bridge between raw, messy aviation data and the intelligence that powers our AI platform. You aren't just building models; you're taking high-frequency aircraft telemetry and noisy air traffic control audio and figuring out what's actually happening in the sky.

What You'll Do

• Derive new signals from high-throughput, real-time data streams, inferring complex physical and operational states that are not directly observable in the raw telemetry.
• Build, evaluate, and iterate on models across diverse modalities, including dense time-series, spatial data, and highly 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 their behavior once they are live.
• Work directly with aviation subject-matter experts to turn operational knowledge into features, labels, and evaluation criteria.

What You Need

• BS/MS/PhD degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Operations Research, Aerospace Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• 2+ years of applied data science or machine learning experience, including models that have run in production.
• Strong Python and strong SQL over large analytical datasets.
• Depth in time-series and sequence modeling.
• Experience working with sparse, incomplete, or unlabeled data - weak supervision, programmatic labeling, and building evaluation sets where no ground truth exists.
• Experience designing data validation and drift detection for continuously arriving data.
• Able to leverage AI assistants to increase velocity while fully understanding and taking absolute ownership of every model, feature, and analysis you ship.
• Strong communication skills and a collaborative mindset, including the ability to explain methodology and its limitations to a non-specialist audience.

Bonus Qualifications

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

Certain positions may be eligible for visa sponsorship.

Archer Aviation does not engage with external recruiting agencies/individual recruiters with whom it does not have a prior written agreement. Archer reserves the right to make use of any unsolicited resumes that it receives and bears no responsibility for payment of any fees asserted from the use of unsolicited resumes. If you are a recruiting agency or individual recruiter wishing to do business with Archer, please reach out to. All employment processes are managed by the Archer People Team.