Perception Engineer – Multimodal AI for Edge Robotics

Shield; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a perception engineer to translate AI research into real autonomous systems. You will evaluate multimodal perception methods, build prototypes, and contribute to Hivemind perception capabilities deployed on edge robotics hardware.

This role emphasizes robust experiments, sensor constraints, edge deployment, documentation, and collaboration with autonomy teams and product engineers to deliver production-ready perception solutions.

Qualifications

• Research depth in computer vision, robotics, machine learning, or embodied learning.
• Experience with multimodal vision, visual foundation models, video understanding, or open-vocabulary perception.
• Strong Python skills and practical work with PyTorch or a similar machine learning framework.
• Ability to design careful experiments, understand model failures, and build substantial research software.
• Interest in production-quality C++ and collaboration with product engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate emerging perception and embodied-AI methods against representative autonomy data.
• Build prototypes that expose where models work, fail, and can be deployed.
• Combine learned and classical approaches for detection, tracking, geometric vision, or sensor fusion.
• Optimize and integrate perception capabilities for edge robotics systems.
• Carry successful experiments into tested Hivemind capabilities that other teams can adopt.

Skills

Python

Experiment design

Research in CV

Research software

Tools

PyTorch

C++

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a perception engineer to translate AI research into real autonomous systems. You will evaluate multimodal perception methods, build prototypes, and contribute to Hivemind perception capabilities deployed on edge robotics hardware.

This role emphasizes robust experiments, sensor constraints, edge deployment, documentation, and collaboration with autonomy teams and product engineers to deliver production-ready perception solutions.