Space Perception Engineer I — Autonomy & Vision

PassFort; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 99,000 - 174,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity incentives

Flexible PTO

Medical, dental & vision coverage

401(k) retirement plan

Job summary

Lodestar is seeking a Software Engineer I - Perception in Los Angeles to join the perception and machine vision teams and advance real-time detection, classification, and interpretation of space targets using computer vision and ML.

This early-career role offers ownership, mentorship, and a culture of extreme ownership, with opportunities to train, evaluate, deploy, and integrate models into simulation and autonomy pipelines.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in AI/ML, Computer Science, Robotics, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 0–2 years of professional experience in ML, robotics, CV, or related field; internships count.
• Solid software engineering in Python, working proficiency in C++.
• Foundational DNN/ML knowledge with CV/Image processing libraries (e.g. OpenCV).
• Ability to take an ML model from training through evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Contribute to the perception system at the core of Lodestar's autonomy software suite.
• Work through the full lifecycle of perception algorithms with senior engineers including training, evaluation, optimisation and deployment.
• Build on and optimise models for edge computing and develop new components with guidance from perception leads.
• Help develop and test methods for predicting relative pose of dynamic space targets in harsh visual environments.
• Integrate perception models into mission simulations and real-time autonomy pipelines.
• Contribute to sensor models and digital twins to improve perception fidelity in missions.
• Maintain and extend perception tooling, training infrastructure, and evaluation frameworks.
• Collaborate across autonomy, estimation, and mission software teams.

Skills

Python

C++

OpenCV

DNN/ML fundamentals

CUDA or GPU acceleration

Linux

Git

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in AI/ML/CS/Robotics

Tools

OpenCV

Docker

Kubernetes

TensorRT

Job description

Lodestar is seeking a Software Engineer I - Perception in Los Angeles to join the perception and machine vision teams and advance real-time detection, classification, and interpretation of space targets using computer vision and ML.

This early-career role offers ownership, mentorship, and a culture of extreme ownership, with opportunities to train, evaluate, deploy, and integrate models into simulation and autonomy pipelines.