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Salary: USD 205,000 - 315,000 / annual
True Anomaly builds autonomous spacecraft, advanced payloads, mission software, and space-based interceptors for U.S. defense and allied space superiority. This Engineering Manager role leads the Perception AI team, growing it from 2 to 7 engineers across five work streams: world models and generative AI for synthetic video generation, multi-target tracking with clutter and decoy discrimination, signal processing and multi-sensor fusion, camera control with online auto-calibration, and edge-deployed object detection.
You will spend approximately 50% of your time on hands-on technical work, providing direction on world model architectures, perception AI systems combining classical computer vision with deep learning, and edge deployment strategies. You will review and approve technical designs for generative AI systems, multi-target tracking algorithms, sensor fusion pipelines, and model compression strategies. You will define perception AI standards and validation approaches bridging synthetic data, simulation, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and operational acceptance.
The remaining 50% focuses on strategic planning and people management. You will define and own the team roadmap in collaboration with perception AI leadership, balancing near-term delivery with long-term capability development. You will translate organizational strategy into actionable team objectives aligned to defense and commercial customer missions, prioritize work across competing demands, manage dependencies with flight software, hardware, autonomy, and simulation teams, and drive continuous improvement in processes and tools.
As a people manager, you will build, grow, and lead the team through recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and retention. You will provide direct people management including 1-on-1s, performance reviews, goal setting, and career development. You will foster a culture of technical excellence, rigorous validation, and rapid iteration, develop individual contributors into technical leaders through mentorship, manage team dynamics, and facilitate knowledge sharing and cross-training.
The role requires bridging generative AI, classical perception, and modern deep learning approaches, guiding the team on when each paradigm applies. Your team will deliver perception AI systems that track satellites through occlusions and complex maneuvers, discriminate objects from decoys against Earth background clutter, and maintain custody for months without ground intervention—where algorithms operate under spacecraft compute and power budgets, mistakes have operational consequences, and systems enable critical space operations.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Education: Master's degree in computer science, robotics, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, or related technical field; Ph.D. or Bachelor's degree with equivalent professional experience also accepted
- Experience: 8+ years in computer vision, robotics, autonomous systems, or perception AI engineering with at least 4-5 years in people management, leading teams of 4+ engineers
- Demonstrated track record of building, growing, and developing high-performing engineering teams including hiring, performance management, and career development
- Proven ability to lead through influence, manage stakeholder expectations, drive execution in ambiguous environments, and deliver results through others
- Strong foundation in perception AI with depth in synthetic data generation, multi-object tracking, sensor fusion, or edge AI deployment (sufficient for technical oversight and credibility)
- Experience with resource-constrained perception AI deployment, real-time vision systems, or aerospace applications operating under strict compute, power, and thermal budgets
- Exceptional communication skills with ability to influence senior leadership, translate between technical and non-technical audiences, and represent the team effectively
- Ability to translate organizational objectives into team strategy, prioritize competing demands, and balance technical excellence with delivery
- Track record defining processes, establishing team norms, and driving execution excellence in fast-paced environments
- Strong cross-functional collaboration with ability to build relationships, resolve conflicts, and drive consensus across autonomy, flight software, hardware, and simulation teams
- U.S. Citizen and eligible for government security clearance
PREFERRED: Prior work with synthetic data generation (generative AI for photorealistic video synthesis, rendering pipelines, domain randomization, sim-to-real transfer); experience with world models and physics-based simulation; deep learning for perception AI (object detection, classification, semantic segmentation, vision transformers); multi-object tracking (data association algorithms, Kalman filtering); sensor fusion (multi-modal perception, time synchronization, covariance intersection); edge AI deployment (model compression, ONNX/TensorRT optimization); classical computer vision (camera calibration, coordinate transformations, structure from motion, pose estimation); signal processing (sensor phenomenology, radiometry, SNR analysis, adaptive filtering); flight software integration (safety-critical systems, deterministic execution, hardware-in-the-loop validation); prior defense or space missions experience; autonomous aerospace systems background; experience managing geographically distributed or hybrid teams; track record delivering complex multi-quarter initiatives; agile methodologies experience; partnering with product management; resource planning and capacity modeling; bridging research prototypes to production systems.
