Sensing & Perception Engineer

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This range is provided by Wardstone (YC F25). Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

$/yr - $/yr

• Integrate sensor modules into avionics architecture.
• Own sensor selection, FOV analysis, lensing, NUC, calibration workflows, and driver integration.
• Develop high-reliability camera interfaces: SPI/I2C, MIPI, USB3, Ethernet, GMSL, or custom buses.

• Build perception pipelines capable of tracking high-speed objects with extremely low latency.
• Implement target detection, centroid extraction, filtering, gating, and motion‑compensation algorithms.
• Develop robust tracking under noise, flare, thermal clutter, high dynamic range, and glint effects.

• Fuse IR/EO data with IMU, GPS, and onboard state estimators.
• Work with controls engineers to build perception‑to‑guidance interfaces for closed loop control.
• Build EKF/UKF filters, temporal alignment, and prediction modules.

• Design sensor test rigs: hot/cold targets, blackbody references, collimators, high‑G mounts.
• Conduct hardware‑in‑the‑loop tests with simulated targets, scene generators, and flight dynamics models.
• Collect, label, and analyze high‑speed footage from ground+flight experiments, HAB flights, and tracking tests.
• Stress‑test perception under temperature, vibration, and shock conditions.

• B.S. in EE, CS, Physics, Robotics, or similar.
• Strong experience with IR/EO camera systems, Radar, imaging physics, calibration, and noise modeling.
• Deep proficiency in computer vision (OpenCV, Num Py, Sci Py, C++/Python).
• Experience implementing real‑time detection and tracking algorithms.
• Understanding of signal processing, filtering, sensor fusion, and coordinate transforms.
• Hands‑on testing experience using thermal cameras, radar, calibration targets, or optical equipment.
• U.S. citizenship required.

• Experience working with LWIR sensors (FLIR Boson/Tau, ULIS, Teledyne, etc.) or Radar Units.
• Background in missile seekers, UAV tracking, air‑to‑air systems, or autonomous robotics under high speed.
• Experience with GPU acceleration (CUDA, TensorRT), embedded systems, or FPGA‑based vision pipelines.
• Familiarity with optical modeling, lens design, radiometry, and atmospheric attenuation.
• Knowledge of IR scene modeling, signature tracking, or synthetic target generation.
• Experience with high‑dynamic‑range thermal environments or high‑G mount design.
• Exposure to defense/aerospace sensor standards or MIL‑STD environments.

Entry level

Full‑time

Engineering and Information Technology