Machine Learning Engineer - Foundational

Department: R&D

Location: Zurich

Employment Type: FullTime

About Us

Harmattan AI is a next-generation defense prime building autonomous and scalable defense systems. Following the close of a $200M Series B, valuing the company at $1.4 billion, we are expanding our teams and capabilities to deliver mission-critical systems to allied forces.

Our work is guided by clear values: building technologies with real-world impact, pursuing excellence in everything we do, setting ambitious goals, and taking on the hardest technical challenges. We operate in a demanding environment where rigor, ownership, and execution are expected.

About the Role

As a Machine Learning Engineer on our Foundational team in Paris, you will build the "brain" of our tactical robots. You will design and scale large-scale, multi-modal foundational models that learn robust representations of the battlefield using Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) from massive amounts of unlabelled Electro-Optical (EO) and Infrared (IR) data. Your work provides the critical foundational weights that our Edge AI team distills into hyper-accurate models running on tactical hardware.

Responsibilities

• Multi-Modal SSL Architecture Design: Design neural network architectures (Vision Transformers) and loss functions (Masked Autoencoders, Contrastive Learning) to jointly learn from paired and unpaired EO and IR data.

• Distributed Training Infrastructure: Manage and optimise training pipelines across multi-node GPU clusters, handling mixed-precision training and data loading.

• Representation Evaluation: Develop metrics and linear-probing benchmarks to prove the latent space captures useful semantic features before distillation.

• Data Strategy: Audit existing EO/IR data lakes and implement cross-attention mechanisms to fuse diverse sensor features.

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Sync with Data Engineers on ingestion pipelines and collaborate with the Edge AI team to ensure high-performance model handoffs.

  Candidate Requirements

• Educational Background: A PhD or a highly research-focused MS in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, or Applied Mathematics.

• Proven Experience: Minimum of 5-6 years of experience for senior levels. Experience training and scaling deep learning vision models (ViTs, CNNs) from scratch in multi-GPU/multi-node environments. Successful application of novel SSL or multi-modal architectures (e.g., CLIP, MAE, DINO) to real-world, non-standard imaging data (IR, SAR, or hyperspectral).

• Technical Proficiency: Hardcore PyTorch engineering skills combined with deep mathematical intuition for representation learning. Knowledge of system-level languages (C++, Rust, or Go) and resource optimisation for edge computing.

• Complexity & Leadership: Ability to architect state machines for fault-tolerant data pipelines and mediate technical trade-offs between hardware and algorithm teams.

• Commitment & Mindset: 100% dedication to Harmattan AI’s mission of providing an ethical defence edge to allied countries. A hybrid researcher-engineer mindset that treats data quality as seriously as algorithm design

We look forward to hearing how you can help shape the future of autonomous defense systems at Harmattan AI.