OSINT Analyst - Vessel Identification
On-siteDubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Job Summary
Adjudicate vessel identifications for automated detections that remain unresolved by attaching verified identities to dark, spoofed, or low-confidence contacts using sourced evidence and explicit confidence levels. Investigate identity manipulation and evasion tactics including AIS gaps, GNSS spoofing, duplicated MMSI, and vessel substitution. Apply open-source intelligence tradecraft by interpreting satellite and optical imagery, cross-referencing ship-photo databases, registries, and beneficial-ownership records to reconstruct patterns of life and ownership over time. Produce structured identification records with clear provenance and disciplined reporting language, then feed ground truth and edge cases back to the data science team to improve automation. Uphold sourcing and data-integrity standards across the team while maintaining rigorous, evidence-led documentation and clear written assessments.
Required Qualifications
- 3+ years in intelligence, investigations, maritime analysis, or a related open-source (OSINT) research discipline, with a track record of turning fragmentary evidence into defensible conclusions
- Working knowledge of the maritime domain: vessel types and particulars, AIS, registries, flag and ownership structures, and shipping operations
- Genuine OSINT tradecraft: source discovery and evaluation, cross-referencing across independent sources, and disciplined handling of uncertainty and provenance
- Confidence interpreting imagery (satellite, optical, and ideally SAR) well enough to reason about what a detection is showing
- Meticulous, evidence-led documentation and clear written assessments, with careful use of confidence and caveat language
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in international relations, security or intelligence studies, maritime studies, geography, data or a related field, or equivalent professional experience
Desired Qualifications
- Familiarity with sanctions, trade compliance, and evasion typologies (shadow-fleet behaviour, ship-to-ship transfers, chokepoint activity)
- Experience contributing labelled data or ground truth to machine-learning workflows, or working alongside a data science team
- GIS and geospatial tooling, and comfort with large datasets
- Additional languages relevant to major shipping and registry jurisdictions
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