Field Perception Engineer - Flexible Hours

Burnbot, Inc.; South San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

BurnBot is seeking an experienced engineer to own the perception stack for remotely operated machines used in wildfire management. You will integrate camera, lidar, thermal, and radar data, calibrate sensors, and fuse outputs to detect vegetation, terrain, obstacles, and people in real environments.

You will deploy perception models on embedded hardware, optimize for latency and power, and evaluate performance with real-field metrics, contributing to safe, rapid wildfire response.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building perception for robots or vehicles outside a lab.
• Strong C++ and Python programming.
• Deep learning for detection and segmentation.
• Multi-sensor calibration and fusion expertise.
• ROS or ROS 2 experience and field data tooling.

Responsibilities

• Own the perception stack: sensors, models, and data engine for field robots.
• Develop detection/segmentation for vegetation, terrain, obstacles, fire, and people.
• Ensure deployment onto embedded compute with real latency and power constraints.
• Provide honest evaluation with real metrics on field data.

Skills

C++

Python

Deep learning

Multi-sensor fusion

ROS/ROS 2

Field data tooling

Education

B.S. or higher in robotics, CS, or EE

Tools

Bags

Replay

Visualization

Job description

BurnBot is seeking an experienced engineer to own the perception stack for remotely operated machines used in wildfire management. You will integrate camera, lidar, thermal, and radar data, calibrate sensors, and fuse outputs to detect vegetation, terrain, obstacles, and people in real environments.

You will deploy perception models on embedded hardware, optimize for latency and power, and evaluate performance with real-field metrics, contributing to safe, rapid wildfire response.