Senior Perception Engineer - Research-to-Product

AI Chopping Block, Inc.; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking an engineer for the Perception team to translate multimodal vision research into real-world autonomous aircraft and vehicles. You will collaborate with researchers and autonomy engineers to evaluate models, build prototypes, and advance successful ideas toward the Hivemind product, addressing sensor, compute, and edge deployment challenges.

Required are a PhD or equivalent in computer vision, ML/DL, or robotics, strong Python and PyTorch, plus production-grade C++.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent advanced research and hands-on engineering.
• Research depth in multimodal vision, visual foundation models, or embodied learning.
• Strong Python skills and PyTorch experience.
• Experience building substantial research software and production-quality C++.
• Collaborative approach to solving problems.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate emerging models against sensor data and autonomy needs.
• Build prototypes and experiments to reveal strengths, limitations, and deployment opportunities.
• Combine learned and classical approaches for detection, tracking, or sensor fusion.
• Optimize and integrate capabilities for edge deployment with Python/C++ software.
• Deliver tested, documented capabilities and support cross-team adoption.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

C++

Experimentation

Robotics

Education

PhD in computer vision, ML/DL, robotics or related field

Tools

ONNX

TensorRT

CUDA

Job description

Shield AI is seeking an engineer for the Perception team to translate multimodal vision research into real-world autonomous aircraft and vehicles. You will collaborate with researchers and autonomy engineers to evaluate models, build prototypes, and advance successful ideas toward the Hivemind product, addressing sensor, compute, and edge deployment challenges.

Required are a PhD or equivalent in computer vision, ML/DL, or robotics, strong Python and PyTorch, plus production-grade C++.