Data Scientist

Muon Space · Silicon Valley, CA, United States

About the role

Muon Space is building a family of infrared imaging missions designed for global wildfire detection and monitoring, weather and cloud characterization, and space-based environmental monitoring. Muon's IR Data Products team builds the analytics system that processes the data from our spacecraft's custom multispectral imaging instruments into data products and analytics for diverse end-user stakeholders from these missions. We are seeking a Data Scientist to join the team to build out the on-orbit data calibration system.

In this role, the candidate will join Muon's calibration team to build the production software systems that deliver calibration and image processing of the unique multi-spectral infrared data from several instrument variations in Muon's IR missions. This is a data science role with a strong software engineering focus: the successful candidate will translate calibration algorithms into hardened production pipelines, complete with monitoring and alerting, unit and integration testing, and automated diagnostic visualizations that keep calibration and image quality observable end-to-end. As the FireSat constellation scales, this role will take on an expanded mandate that spans both the FireSat Initial Operating Capability (IOC) commissioning and Muon's Space-Based Environmental Monitoring (SBEM) program. In the near term, the candidate will build out and operate the calibration software stack for the three FireSat satellites of the IOC constellation and stand up the automated testing and monitoring tooling that keeps that stack healthy at constellation scale. In parallel, the candidate will develop the production calibration infrastructure for Muon's SBEM instruments - a next-generation sensor suite featuring additional infrared spectral bands and significantly more stringent radiometric calibration requirements than the FireSat camera. As the SBEM program advances toward its 2027 launch, the candidate will first collaborate with the IR Instrument team on pre-launch calibration software and test harnesses, then lead the deployment and on-orbit operation of the SBEM calibration pipelines.

This position is hybrid and requires working on-site in our Denver, CO office three days per week.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and operate production-grade calibration and image-processing pipelines for the multispectral infrared imagery from Muon's FireSat and SBEM missions.

Translate calibration algorithms into hardened production pipelines, complete with monitoring and alerting, unit and integration testing, and automated diagnostic visualizations.

Analyze data to ensure calibration and image quality.

Collaborate cross-functionally with scientists, engineers, and data support teams.

Work on both FireSat and SBEM missions, with responsibilities including pipeline design, algorithm translation, data analysis, and cross-functional collaboration.

Required Skills

PhD with 3+ years, MS with 6+ years, or BS with 8+ years of industry experience.

4+ years of experience calibrating imaging instruments.

Hands-on experience with complex data from new imaging instruments.

Proven track record shipping and operating production data or analytics pipelines for scientific data - including monitoring, logging, alerting, and automated testing - ideally in a remote sensing, calibration, or other measurement-instrument context.

Demonstrated experience taking scientific or numerical algorithms - for example calibration, image-processing, or signal-processing algorithms - from prototype to hardened, maintainable production code, including designing unit and integration test suites and quantitative validation against reference data.

Exceptional Python software engineering skills, including modern packaging, testing frameworks (e.g., pytest), version control, code review, and CI/CD workflows.

Solid grounding in statistics, applied mathematics, and enough instrument physics to reason about calibration algorithms, radiometric error budgets, and their diagnostics - and to design meaningful automated quality visualizations on top of them.

Ability to work with a distributed, interdisciplinary team (scientists, engineers, data support).

Ability to thrive in a fast-paced start up environment.

Nice-to-have Skills

Experience with mid-wave infrared instruments and MWIR data processing, and hands-on experience calibrating on-orbit imaging instruments - radiometric, spectral, and geometric.

Deep knowledge of the science of remote sensing and radiometric calibration, including SI-traceability and uncertainty analysis.

Experience with detector characterization (dark current, non-uniformity, linearity, noise, MTF, or PRNU/DSNU), calibration campaign design (blackbodies, integrating spheres, on-board calibrators, deep convective clouds, lunar or vicarious calibration sites), and/or geospatial data processing.

Familiarity with common geospatial data tooling and formats (e.g. XArray, COG, NetCDF), and with building automated visualization or dashboarding tools for scientific data (e.g., Plotly, Panel, Streamlit, Grafana).

Familiarity with containerization and workflow orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes, Airflow, Prefect, Argo, or similar).

Experience with cloud-native systems and infrastructure-as-code (AWS preferred).

Experience working with large TB-sized datasets, and domain expertise in geospatial analytics.

Language Requirement: English (en).

ITAR/EAR Requirements: This position requires access to export controlled information. To conform to U.S. Government export regulations applicable to that information, applicant must either be (A) a U.S. person, defined as a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (), (iii) refugee under 8 U.S.C. 1157, or (iv) asylee under 8 U.S.C. 1158, (B) eligible to access the export controlled information without a required export authorization, or (C) eligible and reasonably likely to obtain the required export authorization from the applicable U.S. government agency. The Company may, for legitimate business reasons, decline to pursue any export licensing process.

Language Requirement: English (en).

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