Senior 3D Vision Engineer for Aerial Robotics (Remote available)

Fiducial; Delft; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Money

25 vacation days per year

Travel expenses reimbursed

Company laptop

Flexible working hours

Remote work option 2 days/week in NL

Job summary

Fiducial is seeking a Senior 3D Vision Engineer for Aerial Robotics to own core on-board vision capabilities for UAVs. You will drive features like interception, collision avoidance, and GNSS-denied navigation, shaping the roadmap and possibly serving as Tech Lead on select projects.

This role requires strong C++ real-time skills, expertise in 3D reconstruction, and hands-on experience with camera calibration, GPU pipelines, and cross-European flight-testing campaigns.

Qualifications

• Strong knowledge of modern C++ and real-time software development.
• Experience with 3D reconstruction, VIO, and photogrammetry.
• Familiarity with quaternions, pose representations, and graphics concepts.
• Calibrating camera intrinsics/extrinsics in real-world conditions.
• Ability to work autonomously with grit and deliver in flight-test environments.

Responsibilities

• Own core Fiducial Scout functionalities: interception, collision avoidance, target acquisition.
• Ensure reliable GNSS-denied navigation and sensor-time synchronization.
• Lead project-focused efforts; may act as Tech Lead coordinating implementation.
• Collaborate with partners across Europe and support flight-test campaigns.

Skills

C++ (real-time)

Real-time systems

3D reconstruction

Visual odometry

GPU programming

CUDA

OpenGL

Vulkan

Python for tooling

Tools

OpenCV

PyTorch

GPGPU tooling

ROS

Job description

IMPORTANT: WE CANNOT PROVIDE VISA SPONSORSHIP

Details

Preferred starting date: ASAP

Weekly availability: full-time (5 days/week)

Location(s):

• Aerospace Innovation Hub, Delft, The Netherlands
• Fully remote, with regular travel to Delft and flight testing locations
• Fully remote, with access to a (future) Munich office and travel to flight testing locations

About the company

Fiducial is a young but fast-growing deep-tech start-up with big ambitions at the frontier of autonomy, perception, and defence. We develop and deploy software for on-board UAV 3D vision in military applications. Our software solutions are built for scalability first, using low-cost and widely available sensors and compute.

Why work with us

We develop our software in the field and close to the points of use. Flight testing is key for what we do and we test all across Europe. Our team members have strong academic background in different fields such as Aerospace Engineering, Computational Science and Engineering, Robotics and Computer Graphics. Our main office is located in the TU Delft campus in the faculty of Aerospace Engineering.

We work closely with top-tier partners, ranging from drone manufacturers to research institutes. Our projects span from orders in collaboration with operational partners to low-TRL research with government agencies. Whether through formal R&D programs or rapid prototyping tracks, we operate at the intersection of innovation and deployment.

Your role

As a Senior 3D Vision Engineer for Aerial Robotics, you will have broad ownership over core functionalities of Fiducial Scout: our on-board situational awareness software for UAVs. This includes interception detection, collision avoidance, target acquisition, and GNSS-denied visual navigation. You will shape and drive the short-to-medium-term development roadmap. In addition, depending on the project, you may take on the role of Tech Lead, guiding technical direction, coordinating implementation efforts, and ensuring delivery within the scope of a specific project. This is a project-based leadership responsibility within our flat organization, rather than a formal managerial position.

What we expect from you

• Good understanding of, and experience with, modern C++
• Real-time software development experience such as game, simulation, robotics or embedded development.
• Second-nature familiarity with 3D reconstruction concepts: projective geometry, bundle adjustment, PnP, triangulation, feature description, image matching. Experience with building photogrammetry, augmented reality, robotics or visual (inertial) odometry (VIO) solutions
• Experience with 3D Gaussian Splatting or derivativesDeep intuition for transform trees and pose representations used in game engines, computer graphics, and robotics. For example, you can work confidently with quaternions and common spatial math without relying on a pre-made framework
• Hands‑on experience calibrating camera intrinsics/extrinsics. Practical experience with cheap cameras and calibration drift in real-world conditions
• Experience ensuring timestamp integrity and tight time alignment across sensors including diagnosing and correcting time offsets, jitter, dropped frames, and clock sync issues in an onboard pipeline
• Experience with GPU programming (CUDA, OpenCL) and graphics pipelines (Vulkan, OpenGL)
• Experience with AI coding agents and prompt engineering to accelerate your effectiveness and codebase ownership as a tech lead
• A high degree of autonomy, determination and grit in making cool tech work.
• Big plus: Experience integrating software on UAVs (onboard constraints, deployment/debugging in flight-test conditions)
• Big plus: awareness of the zeitgeist in the current 3D vision academic literature
• Full time availability (40 hours)

These are a lot of requirements. While having the perfect background is nice, if you are able to present evidence of outstanding engineering and execution capability we are interested in talking regardless. If you are the right fit, we believe in your ability to pick up the required background knowledge on the fly.

What we offer

• Money, of course.
• 25 vacation days per year.
• Reimbursed travel expenses and company laptop.
• (Really) flexible working hours and option to work from home 2 days per week when in the Netherlands. A fully remote position with regular travel to Delft and flight testing locations is also an option.
• Working in an international, world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs solving real-life problems with amazing technology.
• Large freedom in how you work and implement solutions, project ownership is incredibly important to us.
• The opportunity to take technical risks, to implement stuff the ‘right’ way and to iterate quickly with tight feedback loops. We are innovating, learning is to be expected.
• Responsibility over the things you implement, you are the expert on what you build.
• Traveling abroad to test the solutions you built in relevant environments.