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Salary: USD 163,500 - 228,500 / annual
Neros Technologies is a defense technology company rebuilding America's drone industrial base. The company designs and manufactures high-performance unmanned systems tested in combat, iterated at startup speed, and built at scale. The team culture emphasizes speed, hands-on work, and closing the gap between design and deployment.
The Senior Perception Engineer develops the perception software stack that enables Neros unmanned aircraft to detect, classify, and track targets from the air. This is a full-stack perception role covering detection, classification, image-space tracking, and aimpoint selection on both EO (electro-optical) and thermal imagery. The software must run on constrained onboard compute and be validated against logged flight data. As one of the most senior individual contributors in the perception group, this engineer provides design and code review across the team's work.
Key responsibilities include:
- Develop and deliver detection, classification, and image-space tracking for small, low-contrast targets at long standoff in cluttered terrain
- Extend the perception stack to IR and low-light imaging for night operations, including sensor frontend integration, performance characterization, and imagery collection
- Develop onboard target search and candidate generation enabling operator authorization over narrowband or degraded communications
- Implement discrimination of valid targets from civilian, friendly, and neutral objects; set detection operating points with state estimation and engagement authorization teams
- Define the perception output contract, including calibrated confidence and explicit signaling of no detection, suppressed detection, and degraded sensor conditions
- Deploy perception software to embedded compute, owning accuracy and latency trade-offs and compliance with end-to-end latency budgets
- Define and maintain perception evaluation and regression cases against logged flight data; provide senior technical review across the perception team
This role offers the opportunity to work on mission-critical systems where perception directly impacts warfighter capability. The position combines classical and modern computer vision techniques with real-time embedded constraints and field validation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years of professional experience developing production computer vision or perception software, with demonstrated ownership of a perception component from prototype through fielded deployment
- Demonstrated delivery of perception software onto a physical system operating in an uncontrolled outdoor environment (unmanned aircraft, ground robotics, autonomous vehicles, or aerospace platforms), not research or benchmark work alone
- Expert proficiency in C++ and Python, including production experience under real-time or resource-constrained requirements
- Depth in both classical and learned perception: correlation, template, and optical-flow tracking, feature matching and data association, alongside modern detection and classification networks
- Experience deploying neural networks to embedded accelerators, including quantization and characterization of accuracy and latency trade-offs
- Working knowledge of EO and IR/thermal imaging, camera calibration, and sensor characteristics; direct experience in small-object detection at long range, in low light, or under high dynamic range
- Experience defining perception evaluation: dataset and labeling requirements, detection and tracking metrics (precision, recall, track continuity, identity switches), and regression testing against logged flight or field data
- Experience selecting detection thresholds and operating points against explicit cost of false positives versus missed detections in safety-critical or mission-critical systems
- Familiarity with coordinate frames, sensor timing and synchronization, and uncertainty representation at the interface between perception and state estimation
NICE TO HAVE:
- Experience with air-to-ground EO/IR imagery or airborne target acquisition, seeker, or automatic target recognition systems
- Experience selecting or integrating thermal/LWIR sensors, including imaging and procurement trade-offs
- Experience building or contributing to a data engine for a fleet, covering large-scale log capture, indexing and search, dataset versioning, and labeling operations that feed model training
