Perception Engineer

Aurelius Systems is a defense tech startup building autonomous, edge-deployed directed energy systems for counter-UAS. The company is seeking a Perception Engineer to develop and deploy end-to-end perception and sensor-fusion capabilities for a laser-based defense system, including real-time detection, tracking, data pipelines, and edge inference optimization on real hardware.

Responsibilities:

• Design, train, validate and fine-tune machine‑learning and deep‑learning models (e.g., YOLO, RT-DETR, CNNs) for object detection, classification, and segmentation
• Integrate and fuse data from multi‑modal sensors (RGB, thermal, LiDAR/ToF, IMU, encoders) to produce robust, real‑time Regions of Interest (ROIs)
• Research, implement, and as-needed develop high and low-level image-processing techniques, such as deconvolution, low SNR detection, and motion-isolation techniques
• Collaborate with hardware teams to integrate and troubleshoot sensors (global‑shutter and rolling‑shutter cameras, thermal imagers, LiDAR/ToF modules, IMUs) over GigE Vision, USB3 Vision, CAN, SPI, and I²C protocols; develop and debug embedded firmware in C/C++ (or Rust) for microcontrollers (STM32, NXP, TI) and FPGAs using VHDL/Verilog within RTOS environments (FreeRTOS, Zephyr)
• Build scalable data ingestion, labeling, augmentation, and storage pipelines (simulated and field data) ensuring 100k+ labeled frames accuracy
• Optimize inference frameworks for edge deployment (GPU/FPGA), achieving ≥500 Hz end‑to‑end throughput
• Develop dashboards and telemetry for drift analysis, hardware health monitoring, performance metrics, and automated retraining triggers
• Author clear technical docs; mentor junior engineers on best practices in vision, sensor‑fusion, and embedded firmware engineering
• Determines development needs by directly analyzing technical and physical limitations of our goals