Drone Perception Engineer — Shape Autonomy with Vision

BrightAI; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

BrightAI in Palo Alto, CA is seeking a Computer Vision Engineer to own perception for autonomy on a moving platform. You will work on reconstruction, pose estimation, and simulation environments for training flight policies.

You will collaborate with the autonomy team, tackle change detection across weeks, and ensure perception feeds planning with robust latency-aware behavior. Strong field data experience and ROS/PX4 exposure are highly valued.

Qualifications

• Minimum 2+ years in computer vision or robotics perception outside a lab.
• Strong multi-view geometry ability and debugging skills.
• Experience with SLAM, SfM, or visual-inertial odometry.
• Proficient in PyTorch; trained on field data.
• Experience on moving platforms (drone/robot).
• Comfortable at hardware boundary: camera sync, calibration rigs, flight logs.
• Ability to communicate design effectively to autonomy team.

Responsibilities

• Reconstruction pipelines: Gaussian splatting and photogrammetric workflows producing metrically accurate scenes.
• Pose and state estimation: bundle adjustment, RTK/GNSS and IMU fusion, visual-inertial odometry.
• Simulation for autonomy: turning reconstructions into training environments for flight policies.
• Change detection across reconstructions separated by weeks or months.
• Perception in the loop: defining what reconstruction/detection delivers to planning.
• Detection and auto-labeling models running on hardware with real latency constraints.

Skills

2+ years in CV/robotics perception

Multi-view geometry

SLAM / SfM / VIO

PyTorch

Moving platform experience

Camera calibration & sync

Clear design documentation

Tools

ROS/ROS2

PX4/ArduPilot exposure

C++ alongside Python

Job description

BrightAI in Palo Alto, CA is seeking a Computer Vision Engineer to own perception for autonomy on a moving platform. You will work on reconstruction, pose estimation, and simulation environments for training flight policies.

You will collaborate with the autonomy team, tackle change detection across weeks, and ensure perception feeds planning with robust latency-aware behavior. Strong field data experience and ROS/PX4 exposure are highly valued.