Staff Software Engineer, Perception (R5421)

What You'll Do

• Model Development - Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models that improve perception and decision-making for autonomous systems.
• Data Pipelines & Model Training - Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) workflows, and evaluation loops that continuously improve model performance on mission-relevant tasks.
• Model Deployment & Optimization - Deploy and optimize machine learning models for embedded hardware using technologies such as ONNX, TensorRT, and hardware-accelerated inference frameworks.
• Perception & Autonomy Applications - Apply modern machine learning techniques to solve challenging perception and autonomy problems across aerial and other autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments.
• Research-to-Production - Translate cutting-edge machine learning research into production-ready capabilities by balancing model performance, robustness, computational efficiency, and operational reliability.
• Cross-functional Collaboration - Partner closely with perception, autonomy, platform, and software engineering teams to integrate machine learning capabilities into mission-ready autonomous systems.
• Model Evaluation & Validation - Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks to measure model performance, identify failure modes, and guide future improvements.
• Continuous Improvement - Improve training infrastructure, developer tooling, deployment workflows, and model lifecycle management to accelerate experimentation and production delivery.

Required Qualifications

• Typically requires a minimum of 7 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or 4 years with a PhD; or equivalent work experience.
• Expertise of machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience training an deploying ML models for computer vision in a production setting.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to translate research into practical applications.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with developing autonomous systems for defense customers.
• Experience with training/finetuning vision-language models, vision-language-action models, and/or world models.
• Contributions to open-source projects in machine learning or computer vision.
• Track record of publications in leading computer vision and robotics conferences and journals (e.g., CVPR, ICCV/ECCV, RAL, ICRA).

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• Full-time regular employee offer package: Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.