Team Lead – Computer Vision, Basketball Tracking

About SkillCornerAt SkillCorner, we turn a single broadcast camera feed into rich sports data, 100% automatically. Our Computer Vision and Machine Learning algorithms detect every player, the ball and the referees, locate them on the field, track them frame by frame and recognize who is who. Since 2016, we have grown into a global leader in our field. We cover more than 150 men’s and women’s competitions, hold over 100 billion data points on more than 100,000 professional players, and are trusted by more than 350 football, basketball and American football teams. Clubs, federations and agencies use our data to rethink how they analyze performance, scout and recruit. We are a team of about 150 people around the world, with our tech team based mostly in Paris. The Computer Vision team, 16 people strong, sits at the heart of our mission: it uses state-of-the-art deep learning to deliver precise, high-quality tracking data, at scale and in production. The roleWe are looking for a Team Lead to take the helm of our Basketball Tracking team. Reporting to the Head of Computer Vision, you will lead a team of two data scientists, set to grow in 2027, and own the quality, scalability and roadmap of the pipeline that powers our basketball tracking data. You will be both a hands-on technical leader and a people manager. You will shape how our algorithms fit together, guarantee the quality of the data our clients rely on, and work closely with Product to decide what we build next and when we can deliver it. This role sits where applied research meets production. You will split your time between technical leadership, people and project management, and your own contributions to the codebase. Your work will go from experiment to live deployment, used by the professional basketball teams SkillCorner works closely with around the world. What you’ll doTechnical leadership
• Own the basketball tracking pipeline end to end and lead key architectural decisions, from models (CNNs, Transformers, GNNs) to data, training and evaluation infrastructure.
• Shape the technical roadmap with the Head of Computer Vision and the Product Owner, assessing feasibility and delivery timelines and balancing research initiatives with production priorities.
• Lead R&D: monitor the state of the art, analyze performance and turn new ideas into concrete improvements.
• Establish the metrics and tooling that measure tracking quality, and drive continuous improvement from one release to the next.
• Oversee the integration of research algorithms into our AWS production pipeline.
• Remain hands-on in the design, implementation and optimization of our models. People and project management
• Organize and run the team through regular meetings and follow-ups.
• Lead, mentor and grow your team: 1:1s, objectives, feedback and performance reviews.
• Plan and prioritize the team’s work, track progress and anticipate upcoming needs.
• Report progress to management and to the Product team.
• Take part in hiring for the team.
• Raise the bar on engineering and research practices: code reviews, testing, reproducible experiments, documentation and smart use of LLM-based tools. Delivery and collaboration
• Ship reliable releases to production and keep performance stable when new models go live.
• Keep the pipeline healthy: manage bugs and keep code quality high.
• Organize client support, understand client needs and product stakes, and provide the Product team with analyses and answers.
• Work with Data Engineering, Product, Operations and Customer Success to turn client needs into tracking improvements. What we’re looking for
• A graduate degree or PhD in engineering, computer science, mathematics or a related field
• 6+ years of hands-on experience in computer vision with deep learning, including production systems
• Proven experience delivering detection, tracking or recognition pipelines to production, not only research prototypes
• At least 2 years of management experience, leading two or more permanent team members, and experience contributing to a technical roadmap
• Deep learning expertise in areas such as people tracking, re-identification, people, face and object recognition, camera calibration, body pose estimation and action recognition
• Experience owning a complete pipeline and assembling several algorithms into one reliable system
• A strong grasp of the theory behind the models you build, and the judgment to choose between approaches
• The ability to drive technical decisions, explain trade-offs and align stakeholders
• Strong Python for ML: clean, tested, deployable code, with PyTorch or TensorFlow and OpenCV
• Hands-on experience with AWS workflows and Docker
• Excellent communication skills in English Nice to have
• French: a strong plus, as the team you will manage is French-speaking
• Experience with multi-object tracking and re-identification in crowded scenes, or with sports or broadcast video
• Experience with camera calibration, homography estimation or 3D geometry
• Experience running ML pipelines at scale in the cloud (GPU inference, batch processing)
• Notions of MLOps and model optimization
• Experience using LLM-based agents to speed up development, debugging or support
• Publications at top computer vision or ML venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS)
• Knowledge of, or a genuine interest in, basketball Why join us
• Real impact: your work ships to production and is used by more than 350 professional teams worldwide
• Hard, exciting problems: state-of-the-art computer vision on real broadcast video, at scale
• Ownership: lead your own team and shape both the product and the way we work
• A great team: passionate people at the crossroads of AI and sport, with a tech team in the heart of Paris We keep the process simple and transparent:
• 1
- Phone interview (20–30 min)
• 2
- Technical interview (1 h)
• 3
- Technical test
• 4
- Culture fit interview (1 h)