AI Applied Researcher
The sea is the physical layer of the economy — and Europe's most exposed flank. Submarines, drones and threats move through it unseen because the ocean is opaque by default. Pelagon exists to change that: to give Europe a real-time, sovereign understanding of what moves beneath the surface, from detection to interception.
At the core of that mission is a maritime foundational perception model — Pelagon's equivalent of the perception stack that made autonomous driving possible, but for the underwater domain. As an AI Applied Researcher, you own the models at the heart of it, from research to deployment on a distributed, autonomous fleet of UUVs, buoys, sailbuoys and seabed sensors.
What you'll do
- Design, train and ship state-of-the-art multimodal and acoustic models for underwater detection, classification and localization.
- Build the training pipeline end to end: self-supervised pre-training on large unlabeled acoustic corpora, then fine-tuning for specific threats.
- Fuse acoustic, kinematic and other sensor modalities into a single representation that holds up in low-SNR, real-world conditions.
- Shape Pelagon's data strategy — how we capture, curate and compound proprietary data from our own fleet into a durable advantage.
- Distill and optimize models to run on the edge: compute- and power-constrained hardware aboard autonomous vectors at sea.
- Close the loop with sea trials — turn field data and failure cases into the next iteration.
What we look for
- Strong track record training models deployed in production, ideally on audio, signal, time-series or other non-image modalities.
- A physical-AI mindset: you've worked where models meet messy sensor data and real hardware, not just clean benchmarks.
- Instinct for data strategy — you treat the data flywheel as a core part of the model, not an afterthought.
- Comfortable across the ML stack: data, architecture, training, evaluation and deployment. Bias for shipping; you measure success by what works at sea.
- Bonus: background in signal processing, or experience in defense, maritime, robotics or autonomous driving.
Why Pelagon
Founder-led deeptech — Aymeric (founded & exited Scortex, leading AI for manufacturing quality) and Gauthier (ex-Navy officer & McKinsey) — backed by Hexa, Europe's pioneer startup studio (35+ companies, including Front, Aircall and Spendesk). Real data, real deployments at sea, and a mission tied directly to European sovereignty.
Tell us why this mission speaks to you and what you'd bring — we read every application.