The Marine SME - AI sits within the Marine Excellence team and acts as a bridge between marine subject matter expertise and the Product, Data, and AI teams. You will play a key role in ensuring that RightShip's AI models are trained, validated, and governed using accurate and meaningful data. This role combines data annotation-labelling training data with precision-and AI quality assurance, by testing AI outputs, spotting anomalies, and feeding back insights to the AI team.
This is an ideal entry point for someone who is detail-oriented, curious about AI, and eager to grow. The ideal candidate will have expertise in shipping regulations, vessel operations, safety, and incident investigation, with hands-on experience in vessel inspections highly desirable. Equally important is a genuine interest in AI, product development, and technology, with a collaborative, innovative, and open-minded approach.
Key Responsibilities
Marine SME Input into Product & AI Initiatives
- Provide expert guidance on shipping regulations, operational best practices, safety standards, and incident investigation/root cause analysis for AI model development and product innovation.
- Translate complex marine concepts and terminology for non-marine audiences, ensuring Product and AI teams understand the context and implications.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Data, and AI teams to align marine insights with technical requirements and roadmap priorities.
- Participate in the design, annotation, and QA of marine data sets used for AI training and validation.
- Support the governance of AI models to ensure defensibility, accuracy, and compliance with industry standards.
Data Annotation and Labelling
- Annotate, categorise, and tag data following established domain and annotation guidelines.
- Maintain high accuracy and consistency flag unclear or ambiguous cases to the AI team for clarification.
- Suggest improvements to annotation workflows, tooling, or documentation when inefficiencies or recurring ambiguities arise.
- Perform peer-review and quality assurance checks on annotation completed by others to ensure data integrity.
AI Testing & Quality Assurance
- Participate in structured testing of AI model outputs (before production and after updates) validate that classifications, recommendations, and results align with expectations.
- Identify recurring error patterns, edge cases, or bias issues and raise them to the AI team in a structured manner.
- Work with Data and AI Team to create test scenarios and validation datasets that reflect real-world complexity (e.g. rare inspection types, ambiguous vessel profiles).
- Track issues and feedback in collaboration tools (e.g., Jira, Notion, or internal AI feedback systems) to ensure AI teams have actionable data for fine-tuning.
- Document QA results, annotation metrics, and model behaviour observations to contribute to overall governance reports.
Continuous Feedback & Collaboration
- Collaborate closely with AI engineers and data scientists team to continuously improve data quality and model performance.
- Participate in AI playground or internal testing environments, providing qualitative feedback from a user and domain perspective.
- Learn how model fine-tuning, retraining, and evaluation loops work, building foundational understanding for future growth.
About You
- Experience in maritime assurance, vessel operations, safety, and incident investigation with a strong understanding of global maritime standards, PSC regimes, and inspection frameworks. Hands-on experience with vessel inspections, either conducting or being inspected by regimes such as RISQ or SIRE highly desired.
- Analytical precision: You have strong attention to detail, excellent pattern recognition, and a structured approach to problem-solving. You are curious, innovative, and a problem solver who thinks outside the box.
- Quality mindset: You possess experience or a natural aptitude for testing and quality assurance processes, taking ownership of data accuracy and model reliability, not just task completion.
- Communication: You can document issues clearly and provide constructive feedback to AI engineers, turning observations into actionable insights. You have exceptional communication skills and are able to convey marine concepts to non-marine audiences.
- Problem-solving curiosity: When something appears incorrect, your instinct is to investigate and raise questions, always backed by evidence.
- Collaboration: You enjoy working cross-functionally with AI, data, and domain experts in a feedback-driven environment. You are collaborative and open-minded with experience influencing product development and data-driven innovation highly desirable.
- Growth-oriented: You have a deep curiosity about AI, data science, and maritime technology, and are eager to develop your understanding of how human insight and AI systems interact.
