Perception Engineer

About the Role

Shield AI's Perception team is looking for an engineer who enjoys exploring new ideas and making them work on real hardware. You’ll help turn advances in multimodal computer vision, visual foundation models, and embodied AI into useful capabilities for autonomous aircraft and vehicles. Working alongside researchers and autonomy engineers, you’ll evaluate promising approaches, build prototypes, and carry successful ideas into the Hivemind product. You’ll combine learned methods with established perception techniques, working through the sensor, software, and compute challenges that make edge robotics different from a benchmark.

Key Responsibilities

• Evaluate emerging models and methods against representative sensor data and autonomy needs.
• Build prototypes and experiments that reveal strengths, limitations, and practical deployment opportunities.
• Combine learned and classical approaches to improve detection, tracking, geometric vision, or sensor fusion.
• Optimize and integrate capabilities for edge deployment, contributing Python and C++ software with support from experienced product engineers.
• Help deliver tested, documented capabilities and stay involved as other teams adopt them.

Requirements & Tech Stack

• PhD in computer vision, machine learning (ML/DL), robotics, or a related field, or an equivalent record of advanced research and hands-on engineering.
• Research depth in an area such as multimodal vision, visual foundation models, video understanding, open-vocabulary perception, or embodied learning.
• Strong Python skills and experience with PyTorch or a comparable ML framework.
• A thoughtful approach to experiments, evaluation data, and understanding why models fail.
• Experience building substantial research software, an interest in developing production-quality C++, and a collaborative approach to solving problems.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience bringing a research prototype into sustained use.
• Experience with robotics, real sensors, temporal data, or multi-sensor perception.
• Familiarity with vision-language models, vision-language-action models, or embodied AI.
• Experience with C++, edge inference, or model optimization using tools such as ONNX, TensorRT, or CUDA.

Note: You don’t need to meet every preferred qualification or arrive as an expert C++ engineer. We welcome recent PhD graduates and early-career researchers, and we value technical depth, curiosity, and enthusiasm to transfer research to business value more than publication count alone.