Position Overview
WORK OPTION: The NBA currently provides eligible employees the option of working remotely one day per week.
The Automated Officiating team at the NBA is seeking an experienced applied scientist / research engineer with a strong foundation in Computer Vision and Machine Learning. This is a senior position, and candidates ideally have Technical Leadership experience related to the development and deployment of advanced computer vision capabilities applied to highly ambiguous problems. This is a research engineering position and ideal candidates will bring considerable expertise in applying state of the art computer vision techniques to reason about scene and player level semantics, player and ball tracking, and 3D reconstruction and mesh tracking of dynamic objects, with the ultimate goal of building a high accuracy system that is able to make live calls for objective violations using cameras and other sensing modalities.
We are looking for candidates that have the skills and aptitude to work on highly complex and ambiguous problems and are excited to contribute to all aspects of a real-world perception system, from building sensing pipelines to scalable ML data, training, modeling and evaluation pipelines. This team sits within Basketball Strategy & Growth, and its primary goal is to develop advanced, multi-modal officiating capabilities to enhance call accuracy, streamline game flow, and provide decision-making consistency and transparency.
Responsibilities
- Design, implement, and deploy state-of-the-art tracking, 3D reconstruction and geometry estimation, scene understanding and visual recognition systems.
- Define the technical strategy, actively identify problem areas, and proactively propose solutions.
- Lead and advocate for good machine learning design principles and software development practices.
- Stay up-to-date with the latest literature, technologies, and best practices in computer vision, machine learning, and multi-modal foundation models.
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to other engineers on the team.
- Make technical contributions across the automated officiating system, including sensor pipelines, ML data pipelines, training, model development, and evaluation pipelines.
- Maintain clean, well‑tested, and highly extensible code, acting as guardian of the codebase.
Qualifications
- Masters, or Ph.D in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Mathematics, or related field (or equivalent professional experience).
- Proven track record of designing and implementing solutions using modern ML architecture.
- Experience leading projects and driving execution of complex and ambiguous initiatives.
- Proven ability to break complex and ambiguous problems into understandable chunks and map them to applicable modern solutions.
- Demonstrated proficiency in building and deploying machine learning solutions to production.
- Exposure to the entire ML stack, from data pipelines to model inference.
- Excellent problem‑solving skills and adaptability in a fast‑paced environment.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
Bonus Qualifications
- Technical leadership experience with medium sized teams and proven record of shipping production vision models.
- Experience leading projects and delivering solutions for real‑world perception challenges (e.g., AR/VR, autonomous robots, drones).
- Strong C++ programming skills (or other compiled on‑board language) with a history of optimizing and deploying performance‑critical systems.
- Experience with production ML systems, including scalable data pipelines, training infrastructure, model evaluation and deployment.
- Familiarity with computer vision libraries, model deployment (TensorRT, ONNX) and GPU acceleration frameworks.
- Strong grasp of low‑latency, high‑throughput system design, distributed task management systems and scalable model serving and deployment architectures.
- Exposure to CUDA, parallel computing, or high‑performance programming on GPUs.
- Passion for basketball and familiarity with officiating rules.
Salary Range: $245,000 – $330,000.
Benefits: Employees and/or eligible dependents may be eligible to participate in the following company-sponsored employee benefit programs: medical, dental, vision, life/AD&D insurance, short- and long-term disability, fertility and family-forming assistance, wellbeing allowance, educational assistance, mental health coaching/therapy, tax-advantaged accounts such as HSA and healthcare/dependent care FSAs, a 401(k) retirement plan, and time-off benefits that include vacation, sick time, and personal days. Employees are also eligible to receive an annual discretionary performance bonus, awarded at the sole discretion of the Company and subject to any terms and conditions set by the Company.
We consider applicants for all positions on the basis of merit, qualifications, and business needs, and without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, age, disability, alienage or citizenship status, ancestry, marital status, creed, genetic predisposition or carrier status, sexual orientation, veteran status, familial status, status as a victim of domestic violence, or any other status or characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law.
The NBA is committed to providing a safe and healthy workplace.
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