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AI Applied ResearcherHexa · Paris
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AI Applied Researcher

🗓️ Posted 2026-08-24 Paris Fulltime Hybrid ICT
💰 Salary Not shared 📊 Market 4,500 EUR–7,500 EUR/mo

About the Company

Full-time On-site (Paris Marseille) The sea is the physical layer of the economy-the conduit for our energy, communications, and trade. It is also Europe's exposed flank. Pelagon is building the answer. Founded by Aymeric https://www.linkedin.com/in/adepontbriand/ locale en (serial deeptech entrepreneur; founded & exited Scortex, Leading AI solution for manufacturing quality) and Gauthier https://www.linkedin.com/in/gauthier-bouxin/ locale en (Navy officer and McKinsey), Pelagon is building a foundational multimodal acoustic model for autonomous maritime protection (underwater and surface) in service of European sovereignty. It will be deployed on a distributed, autonomous network of vectors (UUVs, buoys, sailbuoys, seabed ) to provide real-time understanding of underwater threats. France and Europe have world-class acoustic engineers and a long history in underwater warfare. By bridging this expertise with modern physical-AI strategies (as seen in autonomous driving and robotics). Europe is still missing it's naval NeoPrime, Pelagon aims to become to lead the way in autonomous marine protection-from detection to interception-partnering with leading navies, primes, and neo-primes, while also operating its own fleet as a service. Pelagon is backed by Hexa http://hexa.cc/, the pioneer startup studio in Europe, which has launched 35+ companies, including unicorns like Front, Aircall, and Spendesk, combining 230m+ ARR and 750m raised. Why this matters The sea is the phy

Responsibilities

  • ● 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.
  • ● Confortable 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.

Benefits

  • ● Founding ownership. You'll be one of the first engineers and will define the technical foundation of the company. Meaningful equity comes with that.
  • ● A mission with weight. This is hardware that protects critical infrastructure and Europe's maritime space.
  • ● Real things, in the real ocean, fast. You'll see your work in the water within weeks, not years.
  • ● AI-first, at the edge, in the real world. We train our own models and run them where it counts: in the water, on the device. You'll be solving the edge-ML and power problems most companies only talk about.
  • ● A sovereign, European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with strong NATO and EU policy momentum behind it.