Senior Perception Engineer

Description

The company designs and builds high-performance unmanned systems for defense, working to rebuild the US drone manufacturing base. Its aircraft are tested in combat, iterated quickly and produced at large scale.

The team works hands-on and at speed, focused on shortening the time between design and fielded use.

This senior individual contributor role builds the software that lets the company's aircraft find, identify and follow targets from the air. The work spans the whole perception pipeline: detection, classification, image-space tracking and aimpoint selection on both electro-optical and thermal imagery. The code runs on limited onboard compute and is checked against recorded flight data. The engineer ranks among the most senior individual contributors in the perception group and reviews the design and code of the wider team.

Responsibilities

• Build detection, classification and image-space tracking for small, low-contrast targets seen from long standoff in cluttered terrain.
• Extend the perception pipeline to infrared and low-light imaging for night operations. Integrate sensor front ends, characterize performance and collect imagery for later learned components.
• Create onboard target search and candidate generation so operators can authorize engagements over narrowband or degraded links.
• Separate valid targets from civilian, friendly and neutral objects. Set detection operating points together with the state estimation and engagement authorization owners.
• Define the perception output contract, covering calibrated confidence and clear signals for no detection, suppressed detection and degraded sensor conditions.
• Deploy perception software to embedded compute with the platform team. Own the accuracy versus latency trade-off and meet end-to-end latency budgets.
• Define and maintain evaluation and regression cases built on logged flight data, and provide senior technical review across the perception team.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience building production computer vision or perception software, including ownership of one component from prototype to fielded deployment.
• Hands-on delivery of perception software onto a physical system in uncontrolled outdoor conditions, such as unmanned aircraft, ground robots, autonomous vehicles or aerospace platforms. Work that went beyond research or benchmarks alone.
• Expert in C++ and Python, with production experience under real-time or resource-limited constraints.
• Strong in both classical and learned perception: correlation, template and optical-flow tracking, feature matching and data association, plus modern detection and classification networks.
• Experience deploying neural networks to embedded accelerators, including quantization and measuring the resulting accuracy and latency trade-off.
• Working knowledge of EO and IR/thermal imaging, camera calibration and sensor behavior, with direct small-object detection work at long range, in low light or under high dynamic range.
• Experience defining perception evaluation: dataset and labeling needs, detection and tracking metrics such as precision, recall, track continuity and identity switches, and regression testing on logged flight or field data.
• Experience setting detection thresholds and operating points against an explicit trade-off between false positives and missed detections in a safety-critical or mission-critical system.
• Familiarity with coordinate frames, sensor timing and synchronization, and uncertainty representation at the boundary between perception and state estimation.
• Experience with air-to-ground EO/IR imagery, or with airborne target acquisition, seeker or automatic target recognition systems.
• Experience selecting or integrating thermal/LWIR sensors, including the imaging and procurement trade-offs.
• Experience building or contributing to a fleet data engine: large-scale log capture, indexing and search, dataset versioning and labeling operations that feed model training.

Conditions

Salary range (US): $163,500 to $228,500 USD.

This estimate covers base salary only. Actual pay may vary based on factors such as experience, education and/or training, critical skills and business considerations, and is not limited to these.

Applicants are welcome regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran standing or disability.

Benefits

• Highly competitive equity grants form part of total compensation.