Embedded Perception Engineer

HavocAI is a leader in collaborative autonomy, focusing on autonomous surface vessels for defense and commercial maritime missions. As an Embedded Perception Engineer, you will architect, deploy, and optimize perception pipelines for autonomous systems, ensuring they can understand the world in real-time under demanding conditions.

Responsibilities:

• Own end-to-end perception pipelines deployed to operational systems
• Deliver high-reliability solutions aligned with mission requirements
• Design, train, and optimize perception models for maritime environments
• Develop object detection, classification, and tracking systems
• Work with large vision models (ViT, CLIP, SAM, or similar)
• Fuse multi-modal sensor data (camera, radar, lidar) into unified perception outputs
• Collaborate with hardware teams to select and integrate sensors
• Develop and validate low-level sensor drivers for high-integrity data pipelines
• Deploy models using NVIDIA Triton Inference Server
• Optimize inference for latency and throughput on edge hardware
• Apply quantization, pruning, and other optimization techniques
• Integrate perception outputs into autonomy stacks alongside mission software and platform teams
• Support troubleshooting of perception performance in operational environments
• Define metrics and evaluation frameworks to monitor deployed system health
• Investigate perception failures and drive resolution across teams
• Partner with operators and customers to translate field challenges into engineering solutions

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Machine Learning, or related field
• 3+ years developing and deploying computer vision or perception systems in C++ and/or Python on Linux
• Experience with modern deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow)
• Hands-on experience with large vision models (ViT, CLIP, SAM, etc.)
• Experience implementing sensor fusion across heterogeneous modalities
• Proficiency with NVIDIA Triton, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, or equivalent inference tooling
• Ability to quickly navigate and understand complex codebases
• Strong systems-thinking mindset
• U.S. Citizenship and eligibility for U.S. security clearance
• Experience deploying perception systems on embedded platforms (Jetson, FPGA, similar)
• Familiarity with maritime or aerial sensor environments
• Experience optimizing models for edge inference
• Knowledge of autonomy frameworks (ROS2, MOOS-IvP)
• Experience with safety-critical or real-time systems
• Familiarity with military systems and defense acquisition processes