Principal Data Scientist

Job Summary

DRS RADA Technologies, a subsidiary of Leonardo DRS, is hiring a Principal Data Scientist on-site in Germantown, MD. DRS RADA Technologies is focused on proprietary radar solutions and legacy avionics systems supporting the defense industry globally.  The company is a global pioneer of AESA tactical radars for active military protection, counter-drone applications, critical infrastructure protection, and border surveillance.

Join our radar defense team as a Principal Data Scientist and take a leading role in how we ensure data quality and validate the machine-learning models behind mission-critical systems.  We are seeking a senior, hands-on practitioner who sets the technical standard for data integrity and classifier evaluation.

You will operate within a collaborative, ego-free culture that values technical rigor, clear communication, and results over hierarchy.

Job Responsibilities

• Own and build data-quality tooling, checks, and validation frameworks for time-series and geospatial datasets, ensuring datasets are ready for the ML training pipeline.
• Lead classifier evaluation and validation.  Define and apply rigorous metrics (precision/recall trade-offs, calibration, cross-validation, confusion-matrix and slice-based error analysis) and turn findings into concrete improvements.
• Establish and enforce standards for data lineage, feature preparation (temporal alignment, resampling, lag features, spatial associations), and reproducibility.
• Identify and resolve common ML data issues such as misaligned timestamps, invalid labels, class imbalance, and edge cases.
• Learn and help refine our established model-training process; partner with the team to improve the end-to-end training pipeline.
• Read, assess, and modernize legacy MATLAB tools; re-implementing in Python or other languages where it improves the process and results.
• Mentor data engineers and scientists; document assumptions, methods, and limitations; and champion technical rigor across the team.
• Provide briefings to customers, Senior Leadership, and internal stakeholders on capabilities and performance.
• Able to work independently or lead small teams and drive projects to completion.
• Work with customers to understand mission needs, review specifications and requirements, and develop solutions to best support them.
• Provide budget, cost, and schedule input for design assignments.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in physical science or engineering discipline; PhD preferred
• A minimum of 12 years of experience
• Mastery of technologies and application domain
• Expected to have knowledge and significant experience in multiple engineering disciplines
• Must be a team player with good communications skills
• Deep proficiency in Python for data analysis, preprocessing, and modeling
• Stron foundation in applied statistics, analystics, and maching learning
• Proven ability to set technical standards and mentor others

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with anomaly detection, time-series analysis, and predictive monitoring.
• Experience with data-pipeline and orchestration tooling (e.g., Airflow, Spark, SQL).
• Exposure to geospatial and/or radar data concepts
• Familiarity with Databricks and/or Azure
• Experience building data-governance, lineage, or monitoring frameworks