Senior Vision-Language ML Engineer - Drone Perception

Frontdoor Defense; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 163,200 - 244,800; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Perception to develop and deploy cutting-edge vision and vision-language models for autonomous drones. You will own features from model development through deployment, collaborating with researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to bring AI capabilities into production.

The role focuses on production-grade ML systems, data pipelines, SFT workflows, and robust evaluation within diverse operational environments.

Qualifications

• Minimum 5 years related experience with a Bachelor's; or 4 years with a Master's; or 2 years with a PhD.
• Proficiency in 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.
• Demonstrated expertise in deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance

Responsibilities

• Design, train, fine-tune, and maintain vision, vision-language, and vision-language-action models for perception.
• Build scalable data pipelines, supervised fine-tuning workflows, and evaluation loops.
• Deploy and optimize ML models for embedded hardware using ONNX, TensorRT.
• Apply ML techniques to perception and autonomy problems across aerial systems.
• Translate research into production capabilities balancing performance and reliability.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate ML into mission-ready systems.
• Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies, and evaluation frameworks.
• Improve training infrastructure and deployment workflows

Skills

Machine Learning

Computer Vision

PyTorch

TensorFlow

C++

Python

TensorRT

ONNX

3D Vision

Clearance

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's degree

PhD

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Senior Software Engineer, Perception to develop and deploy cutting-edge vision and vision-language models for autonomous drones. You will own features from model development through deployment, collaborating with researchers, perception engineers, autonomy engineers, and platform teams to bring AI capabilities into production.

The role focuses on production-grade ML systems, data pipelines, SFT workflows, and robust evaluation within diverse operational environments.