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