Shield AI’s mission is to protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. We are seeking a Senior or Staff Robotics Perception Engineer to develop and deploy advanced perception and navigation capabilities for autonomous aircraft operating in complex and GNSS-denied environments.
This role requires deep expertise in visual-inertial odometry (VIO), visual SLAM, vision-based navigation, state estimation, and camera–IMU sensor fusion. You will take algorithms from early-stage prototypes through embedded implementation, field testing, and flight validation on operational autonomous platforms.
This is not a general AI/ML or object-detection role. We are looking for an engineer whose core expertise lies at the intersection of robotics perception, VIO/SLAM, state estimation, camera and inertial sensing, and real-time embedded deployment.
What you'll do:
- Design, develop, and deploy VIO, visual SLAM, visual localization, and vision-based navigation capabilities for autonomous aircraft.
- Develop robust state-estimation and sensor-fusion solutions using cameras, IMUs, and other onboard sensors.
- Build geometric computer-vision components, including feature tracking, optical flow, pose estimation, triangulation, and visual localization.
- Develop geo-localization and map-matching capabilities using satellite, aerial, or orthophoto imagery.
- Integrate perception and navigation algorithms with flight-control and autonomy systems.
- Implement and optimize algorithms in C++ for real-time operation on embedded Linux platforms.
- Develop and maintain real-time camera and video-processing pipelines using technologies such as GStreamer and V4L2.
- Optimize workloads for NVIDIA Jetson, Orin, or comparable embedded-compute platforms, including CUDA and TensorRT where appropriate.
Required qualifications:
- Significant hands-on experience developing robotics perception or navigation systems.
- Strong expertise in VIO, visual SLAM, vision-based navigation, or GNSS-denied localization.
- Deep understanding of camera–IMU sensor fusion, state estimation, calibration, and time synchronization.
- Strong knowledge of geometric computer vision, including feature tracking, optical flow, pose estimation, triangulation, and visual localization.
- Experience deploying perception or navigation capabilities on UAS/UAVs or other autonomous robotic platforms.
- Strong C++ development skills and experience working in Linux environments.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience with NVIDIA Jetson, Orin, or similar embedded-compute platforms.
- Experience optimizing perception workloads using CUDA, TensorRT, or comparable acceleration technologies.
- Hands-on experience with GStreamer, V4L2, camera pipelines, and real-time video processing.
- Experience deploying containerized software to embedded platforms using Docker.
- Experience with vision-based navigation, geo-localization, or map matching using satellite, aerial, or orthophoto imagery.
- Familiarity with frameworks and libraries such as OpenVINS, VINS-Fusion, ORB-SLAM3, GTSAM, Ceres Solver, OpenCV, or Kalibr.