Machine Learning Engineer, Senior

Location: Onsite — Austin, TX

Employment Type: Direct Hire, Full‑Time

Job Title: Senior ML Engineer

Company Overview

9 Mothers Defense develops AI-enabled systems to counter unmanned aerial threats. Our first product, EDDA, is an autonomous counter-sUAS point-defense platform designed to detect, track, and neutralize Group 1 drone threats. The company is headquartered in Austin, Texas. Position Summary

9 Mothers is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to design, train, and maintain the models that power our counter-sUAS perception stack. The Machine Learning Engineer is responsible for model research, dataset engineering, and the training infrastructure that supports detection, classification, and discrimination of aerial targets. This is an individual contributor position. We don’t use RAG, LLMs, or pre-built cloud APIs. Our stack requires building from the ground up to solve high-stakes problems under strict Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints. You should be capable of building models from scratch and have a fundamental understanding of the problem space. Essential Duties

• Design, train, and iterate on machine learning models for detection, classification, and tracking of aerial targets. - Own the dataset pipeline end-to-end, including data collection, labeling, curation, augmentation, synthetic data generation, and closed-loop retraining based on field performance. - Build and maintain training infrastructure, including experiment tracking, compute orchestration, and evaluation harnesses. - Define metrics and evaluation methodologies that correlate to real-world operational performance. - Support deployment of trained models into the production perception stack, and address discrepancies between training and deployed performance. - Analyze field data to identify and address model failure modes.