Senior Staff Perception ML Engineer (Autonomy)

Frontdoor Defense; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 233,760 - 350,640; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception, to lead end-to-end development of perception models for autonomous flight systems. Location: Washington, DC (on-site).

The role focuses on building state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and VLA models, and deploying them to production for defense customers. You will collaborate with ML researchers, autonomy engineers, perception engineers, and platform teams to translate research into reliable, production-ready systems, while

Qualifications

• Typical minimum: 10 years with a Bachelor’s, 9 years with a Master’s, or 7 years with a PhD.
• Mastery of machine learning fundamentals.
• Experience training and deploying ML models for computer vision in production.
• Strong understanding of 3D vision problems/algorithms.
• Experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow.
• Deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills; translate research into practical applications.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Responsibilities

• Model Development – design, train, fine-tune, and maintain vision/vision-language/vision-language-action models.
• Data Pipelines & Model Training – build scalable pipelines and SFT workflows.
• Model Deployment & Optimization – deploy and optimize ML models for embedded hardware (ONNX, TensorRT).
• Perception & Autonomy Applications – apply ML to perception and autonomy across aerial and autonomous systems.
• Research-to-Production – balance performance, robustness, and efficiency.
• Cross-functional Collaboration – partner with perception, autonomy, platform, and software teams.
• Model Evaluation & Validation – develop benchmarks and evaluation frameworks.
• Continuous Improvement – improve training infrastructure and deployment workflows.

Skills

Machine learning fundamentals

3D vision

Analytical skills

Problem-solving

SECRET clearance

Education

Bachelor’s degree with related experience

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

TensorRT

ONNX

C++

Python

Job description

Shield AI is hiring a Senior Staff Software Engineer, Perception, to lead end-to-end development of perception models for autonomous flight systems. Location: Washington, DC (on-site).

The role focuses on building state-of-the-art vision, vision-language, and VLA models, and deploying them to production for defense customers. You will collaborate with ML researchers, autonomy engineers, perception engineers, and platform teams to translate research into reliable, production-ready systems, while