Senior Perception Engineer - Robotics Union , Ca

Third Wave Automation (TWA) is a rapidly growing startup that has demonstrated its core technology components, proven its market fit, and just closed its Series C funding. If you are excited about cutting‑edge machine learning, robotics that affects the real world, and want to join a company where your skills can have a huge impact, you’ll fit right in. TWA is applying modern machine learning to materials handling—delivering site‑specific forklift navigation and infrastructure‑free pallet handling that continuously adapts to changing floor configuration and warehouse demand.

We are looking for senior and principal level Robotics Engineers with strong perception engineering expertise to advance the automation stack for our autonomous forklifts. As TWA expands with successful customer deployments, we are adding engineers who can improve the reliability, accuracy, and robustness of our perception systems in real‑world warehouse environments.

• Own and improve core perception capabilities:
  Design, implement, and optimize perception algorithms that enable autonomous forklifts to reliably understand and operate in dynamic warehouse environments.
• Develop robust sensor processing pipelines:
  Work with data from LiDAR, vision, and other onboard sensors to improve detection, classification, tracking, segmentation, and environmental modeling.
• Improve perception performance in real‑world conditions:
  Address noise, occlusion, sensor uncertainty, edge cases, dynamic obstacles, reflective surfaces, lighting variation, and other challenges common in warehouse and industrial environments.
• Integrate perception with planning and autonomy systems:
  Ensure perception outputs are accurate, timely, and usable by downstream planning, prediction, localization, vehicle command, and safety systems.
• Drive product maturity through deployed robotics:
  Translate field data, customer deployment learnings, and system failures into measurable improvements in perception reliability, autonomy performance, and customer outcomes.
• Build in an AI‑first engineering environment:
  Leverage AI‑assisted development tools such as Cursor, Gemini, Git Hub Copilot, and LLM‑based workflows to accelerate prototyping, testing, debugging, documentation, and code generation.
• Debug complex autonomy issues end‑to‑end:
  Investigate perception‑driven autonomy failures, reproduce field issues, analyze logs and sensor data, and collaborate across robotics disciplines to identify root causes.
• Influence technical direction:
  Help shape the roadmap for perception and autonomy improvements as a key member of a small, empowered engineering team.
• Mentor and raise the technical bar:
  Provide technical leadership, contribute original ideas, mentor junior engineers, and help establish best practices for perception development, testing, and deployment.

• At least 7+ years of industry experience with a Bachelor’s Degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline.
• At least 5+ years of hands‑on robotics or autonomy experience; final leveling and compensation will be determined by depth of technical expertise, demonstrated ownership, and interview results.
• Deep experience developing robot perception systems for real‑world robotics, autonomous vehicles, warehouse automation, mobile robots, or similar deployed systems.
• Strong foundation in sensor processing, especially LiDAR and/or vision‑based perception.
• Experience with one or more of the following: object detection, object tracking, segmentation, classification, sensor fusion, occupancy grids, scene understanding, obstacle detection, localization support, or mapping.
• Ability to reason about uncertainty, noisy sensor data, occlusion, latency, calibration, and other real‑world perception challenges.
• Strong software development skills with the ability to write efficient, clean, reusable production‑quality code in C++ and Python; command of OOP/OOD.
• Fluency in developing, debugging, and deploying robotics software in Linux‑based environments.
• Experience integrating perception outputs into downstream autonomy systems such as…