Senior Perception Engineer: Real-World SLAM & Vision Systems

Ghost Robotics; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); On-site; USD 140,000 - 185,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive base salary

Full benefits

Equity incentive package

Flexible time off

Job summary

Ghost Robotics in Philadelphia, PA, is hiring a Perception Engineer to design and build SLAM, state estimation, and computer vision for our autonomous robots. You will translate research into production-ready software and collaborate with robotics, controls, and systems engineers.

This role supports Senior, Staff, or Lead levels, with responsibilities spanning end-to-end perception stack work, mentoring, and shipping perception software to real systems.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Robotics, CS, EE, or related field plus 2+ years of relevant work experience; or a PhD in a related field.
• Strong background in robotics perception or computer vision with hands-on experience implementing SLAM or localization in real systems.
• Solid understanding of 3D geometry and coordinate transformations, camera models and calibration, feature-based and/or direct visual methods, and probabilistic state estimation.
• Proficiency in C++ and/or Python
• Experience working in Linux environments
• Familiarity with robotics software stacks such as ROS / ROS 2
• Strong debugging and data analysis skills

Responsibilities

• Design and implement SLAM and localization systems (visual, visual-inertial, lidar, or multi-sensor)
• Develop and integrate computer vision pipelines for feature extraction, tracking, mapping, and scene understanding
• Implement and optimize estimation algorithms (filtering and optimization-based methods)
• Fuse data from cameras, IMUs, lidars, and depth sensors
• Evaluate perception performance using real-world data and metrics
• Optimize algorithms for real-time performance and robustness
• Collaborate with controls and planning teams to support downstream autonomy
• Maintain clean, well-tested, production-quality code
• Contribute to tooling, datasets, and evaluation frameworks
• Owns a defined technical area of the perception stack and delivers end-to-end, mentoring, and driving standards (Senior/Staff/Lead)

Skills

C++/Python

Linux

ROS/ROS 2

Debugging

Data analysis

3D geometry

Education

Master’s degree in Robotics/CS/EE or related

PhD in related field

Tools

ROS/ROS 2

ORB-SLAM/VINS/Cartographer/GTSAM

Job description

Ghost Robotics in Philadelphia, PA, is hiring a Perception Engineer to design and build SLAM, state estimation, and computer vision for our autonomous robots. You will translate research into production-ready software and collaborate with robotics, controls, and systems engineers.

This role supports Senior, Staff, or Lead levels, with responsibilities spanning end-to-end perception stack work, mentoring, and shipping perception software to real systems.