Drone Perception Engineer for Autonomous Flight

BrightAI Inc.; Palo Alto, Northern (CA, KY); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

BrightAI Inc. in Palo Alto is hiring a Computer Vision Engineer to own perception for autonomy on a moving platform. You’ll shape reconstruction, pose estimation, and training environments using drone imagery to help autonomous flight decisions.

You’ll combine Gaussian splatting and photogrammetric pipelines with SLAM/VO techniques, and collaborate with the autonomy team to minimize latency and improve reliability in real-world conditions.

Qualifications

• 2+ years in computer vision or robotics perception with external-world deployments.
• Solid multi‑view geometry and ability to debug a bundle adjustment.
• Hands‑on SLAM, SfM, or visual‑inertial odometry.
• Proficient in PyTorch with field data training and debugging.
• Experience on moving platforms (drone/robot) where ground truth is expensive.
• Comfort with camera synchronization and reading flight logs.
• Ability to communicate design clearly in documentation.

Responsibilities

• Own reconstruction and perception for a moving platform.
• Develop Gaussian splatting and photogrammetric pipelines.
• Handle pose estimation and sensor fusion including RTK/GNSS and IMU.
• Build simulation environments for training and evaluating flight policies.
• Characterize sim-to-real gaps and latency effects.
• Support change detection across time-separated reconstructions.
• Enable auto-labeling and detection under real hardware constraints.

Skills

Computer vision

Robotics perception

Multi-view geometry

SLAM / SfM / VO

Documentation/writing

System debugging

Tools

PyTorch

C++

Python

Job description

BrightAI Inc. in Palo Alto is hiring a Computer Vision Engineer to own perception for autonomy on a moving platform. You’ll shape reconstruction, pose estimation, and training environments using drone imagery to help autonomous flight decisions.

You’ll combine Gaussian splatting and photogrammetric pipelines with SLAM/VO techniques, and collaborate with the autonomy team to minimize latency and improve reliability in real-world conditions.