Principal Acoustic Scientist

Sparse recordings in, a defensible hemisphere out

We are hiring a physical acoustics scientist. You will take a sparse set of real field recordings of a real platform and reconstruct its complete acoustic hemisphere, with error bars that a test and evaluation customer will accept. Then you will make the reconstruction methods better than the published baselines.

The work rests on physical acoustics of moving sources: outdoor sound propagation, directivity, Doppler, atmospheric effects. It is not room acoustics, and it is not audio engineering for music.

To retire the named technical risk

One problem carries the program: adapting learned-field methods to the emitter-directivity problem. That is not the published room-acoustics formulation, and the distance between the two is the work. The source moves, the emitter is directional, the environment is unbounded, and the measurements are sparse by design.

The reference point is MIT CSAIL, "Learning Neural Acoustic Fields" (arXiv:2204.00628, 2022). Treat it as a starting formulation, not an answer. Closing the gap between it and our conditions is the named technical risk in the technical thesis, and this hire is the person who retires it.

The judgment calls are yours

1. The source-hemisphere formulation

   Adapting learned-field methods to the emitter-directivity problem, which is not the published room-acoustics formulation. You define the representation, the training regime, and what counts as convergence.

2. The capture methodology

   Microphone geometry, pass profiles, calibration discipline, error budgets. Deciding how sparse a capture can go before accuracy dies, and proving where that line sits rather than asserting it.

3. Digital signal processing (DSP) chain integrity

   De-propagation for spreading and atmospheric absorption, deconvolution, back-propagation to the one meter reference. You own the chain end to end, including the split between chain error and reconstruction error that the current proof of concept self-scores.

4. The validation regime

   Ground truth protocols, uncertainty quantification, honest error bars on every product output. Credibility with test and evaluation (T&E) grade customers rests on your standards, not on marketing language.

5. Propagation modelling

   Terrain and urban effects, and judging when a fast approximation is fit for purpose and when it is misleading. Knowing the difference is the job.

The background the work requires

Required

• A doctorate in acoustics, applied physics, aerospace or mechanical engineering, or equivalent research experience in outdoor or aeroacoustics
• Working command of the physical acoustics of moving sources, including Doppler and the effect of source motion on a measured spectrum
• Demonstrated experience in outdoor sound propagation: geometric spreading, atmospheric absorption, ground effect, and refraction under real wind and temperature profiles
• Practical understanding of source directivity, and how it shifts with operating state and observation angle
• Hands-on field measurement experience: microphone calibration, instrumentation error, and uncertainty budgets you have had to defend to someone who checked
• Numerical modelling ability in Python or an equivalent language, including learned-field or other modern data-driven methods

Preferred

• Prior work measuring the noise of helicopters, propeller aircraft, or drones
• Familiarity with the neural acoustic field literature, including MIT CSAIL arXiv:2204.00628, and with where implicit neural representations of continuous fields break down
• Familiarity with the governing standards: International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9613 for outdoor propagation, ISO 3744 for sound power, and SAE Aerospace Recommended Practice (ARP) 866 for atmospheric absorption
• Experience running instrumentation at a flight test event or an open-air test range
• Published work where the underlying data and its uncertainty were released alongside the result

To be direct about the fit: this is not room acoustics, not architectural acoustics, and not audio engineering for music. If your measurement experience is indoors and dense, this is the wrong role.

Send a resume. That is the whole application.

No cover letter, no take-home. If you are qualified, we will know it. If we are not worth your time, you will know it.

Every application gets a reply within 72 hours, including the ones that do not move forward.