Staff Perception ML Engineer for Autonomous Systems

Front Door Defense; Washington, Dallas, San Diego, Boston (District of Columbia, TX, CA, MA); On-site; USD 195,200 - 292,800; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI in Washington, DC area seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Perception to lead the development of perception models from research to production for autonomous systems. You will own the architecture, mentor engineers, and collaborate with researchers across vision, vision-language, and deployment for mission-ready autonomy.

The role requires deep ML expertise, production experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow, and the ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of related experience with a Bachelor's, or 6+ with a Master's, or 4+ with a PhD.
• Expertise 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.
• Expertise deploying models using TensorRT and ONNX.
• Proficiency in C++ and Python.
• Ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.

Responsibilities

• Lead design, train, fine-tune, and maintain vision and vision-language models.
• Build scalable data pipelines and evaluation loops for model performance.
• Deploy and optimize ML models for embedded hardware.
• Apply machine learning to perception and autonomy problems across systems.
• Translate research into production-ready capabilities with balanced performance.
• Collaborate with perception, autonomy, platform, and software teams.
• Develop benchmarks, testing methodologies and evaluation frameworks.
• Improve training infrastructure and deployment workflows.

Skills

Machine learning fundamentals

C++

Python

Analytical skills

Education

Bachelor's degree or higher in a related field

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

ONNX

TensorRT

Job description

Shield AI in Washington, DC area seeks a Staff Software Engineer, Perception to lead the development of perception models from research to production for autonomous systems. You will own the architecture, mentor engineers, and collaborate with researchers across vision, vision-language, and deployment for mission-ready autonomy.

The role requires deep ML expertise, production experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow, and the ability to obtain a SECRET clearance.