Autonomy Engineer – Perception / Autonomous UAVs / GPS‑Denied Navigation (Hybrid)

Autonomy Engineer – Perception / Autonomous UAVs / GPS‑Denied Navigation (Hybrid)

US Dual‑Use Robotics Start‑up (Defense & Commercial)

$150,000 – $220,000 base stock options (DOE)

Cambridge, MA (Hybrid)

The Company

• My client is a rapidly growing US robotics start‑up building fully autonomous small unmanned aircraft for GPS‑denied and contested environments.
• Backed by c. $12m in funding (seed Series A) and government/DoD‑type contracts, with ~30 people total and ~20 in engineering.
• The company develops the full autonomy stack (perception, state estimation, planning, controls) for fast, low‑altitude flight using only onboard sensing and compute.

Why Join?

• Own core perception systems that directly enable high‑speed, low‑altitude autonomous flight through complex environments (trees, buildings, clutter).
• Work in a tight‑knit, cross‑functional team, taking algorithms from simulation into real‑world flight tests with dedicated flight operations support.
• Hybrid Cambridge, MA setup: software engineers typically in‑office 3–4 days per week, with competitive salary, equity, and early‑stage impact.

The Role

A technical, hands‑on role where you will:

• Design and implement onboard perception software for obstacle detection, tracking, and scene understanding to support autonomous navigation and collision avoidance.
• Build and maintain SLAM, 2D/3D computer vision, and sensor‑fusion pipelines using real flight data in GPS‑denied and contested environments.
• Collaborate with planning and controls engineers so perception outputs can drive feasible, agile evasive manoeuvres at very high speeds.
• Deploy and optimize your software on real‑time, resource‑constrained embedded compute and integrate it into production flight stacks.

The Essential Requirements

• Graduate‑level background (Master’s/PhD) in Robotics, CS, or similar, or equivalent high‑end industry experience in autonomy/perception.
• Strong C/C skills with experience shipping production, multi‑threaded, real‑time robotics or perception software.
• Proven experience building SLAM and/or perception systems with both 2D and 3D computer vision, using real‑world sensor data in challenging conditions.

What Will Make You Stand Out

• ML‑based computer vision experience (e.g. ViT‑style architectures for detection/segmentation/depth) deployed on embedded platforms (e.g. NVIDIA Jetson).
• Background in dense scene reconstruction (e.g. occupancy grids, NeRF‑style approaches, Gaussian splatting) or similar advanced mapping methods.

If you are interested in this role, please apply with your resume through this site.

Disclaimer

No terminology in this advert is intended to discriminate on the grounds of age, sex, race, religion or belief, disability, pregnancy and maternity, marriage and civil partnership, sexual orientation, gender, and/or gender reassignment, and we confirm that we are happy to accept applications from anyone for this role. Attis Global Ltd operates as an employment agency and employment business. More information can be found at attisglobal.com.

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