Senior Software Engineer, Perception

About the role

You will design and implement machine learning models to enhance the situational awareness of autonomous aerial platforms. This role bridges the gap between research and field deployment, focusing on creating reliable perception systems for complex environments.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Create, train, and refine vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models.
• Build and maintain data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning workflows, and evaluation systems.
• Optimize models for embedded hardware using TensorRT and ONNX.
• Apply machine learning to solve perception tasks for autonomous systems in real-world scenarios.
• Transition research concepts into production-ready software.
• Collaborate with autonomy and platform engineering teams to integrate ML capabilities.
• Establish testing frameworks and benchmarks to validate model performance.
• Enhance developer tooling and model lifecycle management processes.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree with 5 years of experience, Master's degree with 4 years, or PhD with 2 years of relevant experience.
• Proficiency in machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying computer vision models in production environments.
• Knowledge of 3D vision algorithms.
• Experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Expertise in model deployment via TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Nice to have

• Experience developing autonomous systems for defense applications.
• Background in fine-tuning vision-language, vision-language-action, or world models.
• Contributions to open-source machine learning or computer vision projects.
• Research publications in journals or conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, RAL, or ICRA.

Skills & tools

• PyTorch, TensorFlow, C++, Python, ONNX, TensorRT.

Practical notes

• Compensation includes salary, bonus, benefits, and equity.
• Offers are subject to background checks and reference verification.
• Shield AI is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.
• Accommodations for disabilities are available upon request.