Machine Learning Engineer - ML Systems, Automated Officiating

WORK OPTION:Remote. We are open to candidates able to work in the New York, NY, or Secaucus, NJ, offices.

Group Summary:

The Automated Officiating team is a new function spanning multiple departments across the NBA, including the Basketball Strategy & Growth and Media Ops & Technology departments. The team’s primary goal is to develop a real-time, multi-modal officiating product – leveraging computer vision and other sensing modalities – used during live NBA games to enhance call accuracy, streamline game flow, and provide decision-making consistency and transparency. This is a new team within the NBA and provides significant opportunities for ownership, accelerated learning, and growth.

Position Description:
The NBA is seeking an experienced Machine Learning Engineer to be a key contributor to the Automated Officiating team and be responsible for data infrastructure and ground truth labeling functions. This is a ML Systems and data infra engineering role with scope covering all data infrastructure needed to enable ML iteration at velocity. The ideal candidate will bring experience working on high volume sensor data (e.g., cameras, lidars) and understand the ML data flow from sensing, cloud storage, data compressions, and distributed data processing to produce datasets to train large perception models. This person will play a critical role in taking our product from 0 to 1, leveraging expertise typically found in autonomous vehicles, robotics, AR/VR, or other real-time ML-driven systems.

Major Responsibilities:

• Play a pivotal role in defining the distributed (PB scale) ML data strategy for Automated Officiating.
• Build and maintain data pipelines that handle multi-modal sensor data, including video (high frame rates), sensor feeds, and player and ball tracking data.
• Optimize the pipeline for storage, compute, and execution velocity.
• Own the data labeling pipelines and tooling, and work with the Automated Officiating team to define ground truth taxonomies and versioning.
• Collaborate with the Automated Officiating modeling team to integrate perception algorithms into end-to-end officiating solutions.
• Collaborate with other Media Ops & Technology teams and drive integration of the deployed Automated Officiating outputs into the Replay Center, the broadcast, and other outlets.
• Develop profiling tools to understand performance and data bottlenecks and address.
• Have a strong sense of ownership and be excited to wear many hats.
• Be a guardian of the codebase and push for clean, well-tested and highly extensible code.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of 5+ years of experience building production ML data pipelines and/or ground truth labeling and tooling.
• Experience working with ML data pipelines involving camera, lidar, or other dense sensor input.
• Proficiency in Python and experience with production Machine Learning pipelines: large scale dataset creation, dataset versioning, training frameworks and metrics pipelines.
• Strong grasp of low-latency, high-throughput system design, and distributed computing applied to ML pipelines.
• Familiarity with Cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their offerings.
• Excellent problem-solving skills and adaptability in a fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Experience building systems to read, synchronize and replay sensing input from a variety of sensors ranging from high-definition cameras to IMUs and IR sensors.

Bonus Qualifications:

• Familiarity with video / image compression techniques and experience incorporating decompression into data pipelines.
• Familiar with ML training frameworks (e.g., Pytorch Lightning), and prior experience building ML training and evaluation pipelines.
• Exposure to CUDA, parallel computing, or high-performance programming on GPUs.
• Background in sports analytics or experience working with sports-specific data.
• Passion for basketball and familiarity with officiating rules.

Salary Range: $210,000 - $300,000

The NBA does not accept unsolicited resumes from search firms or any other third parties. Any unsolicited resume sent to the NBA will be considered NBA property, and the NBA will not pay a fee should it hire the subject of any unsolicited resume.

The NBA considers applicants for all positions on the basis of merit, qualifications, and business needs, and without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, alienage or citizenship status, ancestry, marital status, genetic predisposition or carrier status, 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. To safeguard our employees and their families, our visitors, and the broader community from COVID-19, and in consideration of recommendations from health authorities and the NBA’s own advisors, any individual working onsite in our New York and New Jersey offices must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The NBA will discuss accommodations for individuals who cannot be vaccinated due to a medical reason or sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance.

About the NBA

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a global sports and media organization with the mission to inspire and connect people everywhere through the power of basketball.  Built around five professional sports leagues:  the NBA, WNBA, NBA G League, NBA 2K League and Basketball Africa League, the NBA has established a major international presence with games and programming available in 214 countries and territories in 60 languages, and merchandise for sale in more than 200 countries and territories on all seven continents.  NBA rosters at the start of the 2023-24 season featured a record 125 international players from 40 countries and territories.  NBA Digital’s assets include NBA TV, NBA.com, the NBA App and NBA League Pass.  The NBA has created one of the largest social media communities in the world, with more than 2.3 billion likes and followers globally across all leagues, team and player platforms.  NBA Cares, the NBA’s global social responsibility platform, partners with renowned community-based organizations around the world to address important social issues in the areas of education, inclusion, youth and family development, and health and wellness.