Research Scientist: Sensemaking & Autonomous Control

Date Posted:

2025-12-16

Country:

United States of America

Location:

MA105: BBN Headquarters 10 Moulton Street , Cambridge, MA, 02138 USA

Position Role Type:

Hybrid

U.S. Citizen, U.S. Person, or Immigration Status Requirements:

The ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. government issued security clearance is required.​ U.S. citizenship is required, as only U.S. citizens are eligible for a security clearance

Security Clearance:

DoD Clearance: TS/SCI

RTX Corporation is an Aerospace and Defense company that provides advanced systems and services for commercial, military and government customers worldwide. It comprises three industry-leading businesses – Collins Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney, and Raytheon. Its 185,000 employees enable the company to operate at the edge of known science as they imagine and deliver solutions that push the boundaries in quantum physics, electric propulsion, directed energy, hypersonics, avionics and cybersecurity. The company, formed in 2020 through the combination of Raytheon Company and the United Technologies Corporation aerospace businesses, is headquartered in Arlington, VA.   

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The following position is to join our BBN team:

Our Sensemaking and Autonomous Control (SMAC) group is seeking experienced professionals for exciting technology development positions in its Cambridge MA or Rosslyn VA office. The successful candidate will be self-motivated with an ability to work independently, solve solving complex technical challenges as a member of a multi-disciplinary team, and support business growth opportunities.

If you enjoy working in a culture that emphasizes innovation, teamwork, and technical excellence in a collegial work environment that values creativity and initiative, we'd like to hear from you.

Unlike other small business defense research companies, BBN is uniquely positioned to collaborate and transition technology within greater RTX. When our goals are aligned, we support greater RTX in the actualization of our key insights into next generation products.

The following position is to join our BBN SMAC team:

What You Will Do:

In support of chiefly DoD and Intelligence Community missions, BBN’s Sensemaking and Autonomous Control (SMAC) group specializes in the development and deployment of cutting-edge, trustworthy, third-wave Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to enable the advanced machine reasoning needed for autonomous and trusted systems of tomorrow.

The SMAC group works challenging, often resource constrained (e.g. edge computing), inference and optimization problems collaboratively with sensor, hardware, and platform providers to coordinate and/or synergize assets.  The group blends classical optimization, probabilistic, model-based estimation and control, computer vision, and physics-based approaches with AI architectures for supervised learning and deep reinforcement learning to provide performant, robust, and trustworthy solutions.    

You will support SMAC in developing novel analytics and algorithms to address complex, open-ended, DoD and intelligence problems requiring unprecedented speed, performance, and trustworthiness. You will work with globally recognized R&D leaders in their field to develop the technologies of tomorrow for our defense and intelligence communities. You will be work side by side with leading scientists, engineers, and program managers of all levels to enable tactical and strategic decision-making using Python, Java, C, and/or C++. You will work with senior and junior technical staff to grow our business with both current and new customers.

Qualifications You Must Have:

• Typically requires a degree in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) and minimum 8 years prior relevant experience or an Advanced Degree in a related field and minimum 5 years of experience or in absence of a degree, 12 years of relevant experience

• Extensive experience in Model Based Estimation and Control, including computer vision, for autonomous systems, sensors, and edge compute
• Experience using modern AI applications, such as PyTorch or Tensorflow.
• Experience with image and/or signal processing
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to work in a team environment with scientists and engineers at multiple seniority levels to derive and explain solutions to complex problems
• Ability and willingness to earn a DoD or IC Top Secret security clearance, which generally requires a US citizenship

Qualifications We Prefer:

• Experience executing novel AI research to solve challenges related to physical sensing/control/autonomy in sparse data environm