Computer Vision Engineer

Skyways designs, builds, and operates fully autonomous long-range cargo aircraft. Founded in 2017, the company has spent the last eight years developing and deploying autonomous logistics systems for real-world operations.

Our V2 aircraft carries 30 lbs up to 500 miles, while our next-generation V3 carries 100 lbs over 1,000+ miles with 20+ hours of endurance. Both use a hybrid-electric architecture that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like a plane, enabling long-range autonomous delivery without traditional runway infrastructure.

Today, Skyways aircraft operate across three continents in controlled national airspace under FAA oversight and in support of U.S. military operations. We are transitioning from prototype development to full-rate production and scaling toward large autonomous cargo fleets.

Backed by Y Combinator and a $37M AFWERX STRATFI award from the U.S. Air Force, Skyways is creating a new form of transportation to advance our civilization from Austin, Texas.

Skyways aircraft have to land themselves, every time, often in places they have never seen before. This role builds the perception that makes that possible.

• Own major components of the landing perception stack: target detection and relative pose estimation for marker-based landing, or safe-zone selection, hazard, and slope detection for targetless landing
• Build real-time CV inference that runs within the compute, power, and latency budget of an embedded flight system
• Develop the perception pipeline across detection, tracking, segmentation, and depth or stereo, tuned for the conditions the aircraft actually flies in
• Fuse camera with depth, stereo, or LiDAR where it improves robustness
• Turn flight data, telemetry, and field failures into model and pipeline improvements through a tight iteration loop
• Contribute to the datasets, evaluation, and regression tooling that keep landing performance honest across releases
• Debug real-world perception failures and close the gap between simulation, ground testing, and live flight
• Work side by side with autonomy, GNC, and flight operations to integrate perception into the full landing sequence

• Direct, hands-on perception work on autonomous landing or a closely adjacent problem: target detection and relative pose, or safe-zone and hazard selection from terrain and depth.
• 3+ years post-grad shipping production CV software, with strong CS fundamentals across algorithms, data structures, and low-level reasoning
• Production C++ for real-time inference on embedded or resource-constrained targets, plus Python for training pipelines and tooling
• A track record of taking perception from prototype through deployment and iteration on a real system, not research alone
• Engineering hygiene to move fast in a live codebase:
  Git, testing discipline, CI/CD, clean abstractions
• Comfort debugging at the system level using logs, telemetry, and real-world data

• Experience with autonomous aircraft, UAS, or other aerial platforms
• Depth, stereo, or LiDAR fusion in production
• Real-time or embedded systems experience, including GPU or accelerator optimization
• Familiarity with ROS2 or similar robotics frameworks
• Experience deploying perception or ML to compute-constrained environments

Want to join our mission? Apply to learn more!

Due to U.S. government contract requirements, this role is limited to U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, or candidates from specific countries authorized under applicable export control regulations.

Skyways is an Equal Opportunity employer committed to diversity in the workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status or any other factor protected by applicable local, state or federal laws.