At Ocean Aero, we’ve developed the Triton, the world’s first and only Autonomous Underwater and Surface Vehicle (AUSV) that both sails on and dives below the ocean’s surface. Powered solely by the wind and sun, the Triton is ideal for extended deployment and broad scope mission execution that exceeds the capabilities of other uncrewed platforms limited to a single ocean domain. Our versatile system architecture means we can craft niche payloads for specific applications or take any of our pre-packaged sets off the shelf.

Ocean Aero has a collaborative culture with plenty of opportunities for growth and ownership, and comprehensive benefits.

Role Description:

The Natural Language Processing Engineer will be responsible for designing, developing, integrating, and documenting Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities that help Ocean Aero systems process, search, summarize, and generate language from mission, vehicle, customer, and operational data. The role will focus on algorithm development, speech recognition, sentiment analysis, text processing, language generation, information retrieval, application integration, and continuous learning. The Natural Language Processing Engineer will be working alongside a team of creative engineers with a diverse set of backgrounds and skills. This role will report to the Software Engineer Lead.

Role Responsibilities:

• Develop NLP algorithms for text processing, classification, extraction, summarization, search, and language generation
• Build speech recognition workflows for searchable transcripts and structured application inputs
• Develop sentiment, intent, and entity extraction for logs, feedback, user inputs, and communications
• Build information retrieval, ranking, semantic search, and Q&A tools across documents and mission records
• Integrate NLP services into applications, APIs, dashboards, autonomy tools, and customer-facing products
• Prepare, label, validate, version, and govern language datasets for training, evaluation, and auditability
• Create benchmarks, monitoring, and feedback loops for continuous learning and measurable improvement
• Collaborate across teams to plan, build, test, document, and demonstrate NLP capabilities

Role Requirements:

• B.S. from an accredited university, such as Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics or Physics
• Demonstrated 3+ years’ experience in software development/engineering
• Strong Python skills, with experience developing production-grade NLP, machine learning, or language-processing systems
• Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, machine learning, statistical language models, and modern NLP methods
• Experience with speech recognition, text processing, sentiment analysis, information retrieval, embeddings, transformers, or language generation
• Experience integrating models and services with applications, APIs, databases, cloud services, and Linux-based deployment environments
• Excellent cross-department communication skills
• Ability to think independently about creative solutions to design problems
• Experience with sailing a plus
• Team player, with excellent verbal, written, and presentation skills
• Ability to travel occasionally, as needed
• US Citizenship required
• Ability to obtain and maintain a DoD Security Clearance
• Possess a valid Transportation Worker Identity Credential (TWIC) or successfully pass the requirements to obtain one
• Ability to pass drug screen, background check, and motor vehicle screening

Role Preferences:

• Experience with transformer-based NLP models, embeddings, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, prompting, or model evaluation
• Experience with automatic speech recognition, speech-to-text pipelines, speaker diarization, audio preprocessing, or voice command interfaces
• Experience with search, ranking, semantic retrieval, knowledge graphs, or documentation and customer-support intelligence systems
• Experience deploying ML/NLP capabilities with cloud services, containers, CI/CD, observability, and secure data handling
• Experience with the marine environment and systems, including ROVs, UUVs, USVs or sail boats is a definite plus; general interest in robotics