Senior Engineer Tech Lead 3D Vision for Aerial Robotics - Remote Possible

📋 Description

• • Join Fiducial, a rapidly growing deep-tech startup at the forefront of autonomy, perception, and defense, as a Senior Engineer and Tech Lead for 3D Vision in Aerial Robotics. You will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of on-board UAV 3D vision software, specifically for military applications. Our mission is to develop scalable software solutions that leverage low-cost, widely available sensors and compute, enabling advanced situational awareness for unmanned aerial vehicles.
• • In this critical role, you will have extensive ownership over core functionalities of Fiducial Scout, our flagship software designed for comprehensive on-board situational awareness. This encompasses vital capabilities such as interception detection, collision avoidance, target acquisition, and robust GNSS-denied visual navigation. Your technical leadership will directly influence the short-to-medium-term development roadmap, guiding the team towards innovative solutions and impactful advancements.
• • You will be instrumental in pushing the boundaries of 3D vision technology. This involves deep engagement with modern C++ development, ensuring real-time performance and reliability. Your expertise will be crucial in areas like projective geometry, bundle adjustment, Perspective-n-Point (PnP) algorithms, triangulation, feature description, and image matching. A strong understanding of these concepts is fundamental to building sophisticated perception systems.
• • We expect you to have hands-on experience in developing solutions for photogrammetry, augmented reality, robotics, or visual-inertial odometry (VIO). Familiarity with cutting-edge techniques such as 3D Gaussian Splatting and its derivatives will be highly valued, as you will be exploring and implementing these advanced methods.
• • A deep intuition for transform trees and pose representations is essential. You should be comfortable working with quaternions and common spatial mathematics without relying on pre-built frameworks, demonstrating a profound understanding of the underlying principles used in game engines, computer graphics, and robotics.
• • Practical experience in calibrating camera intrinsics and extrinsics is a must. This includes working with cost-effective cameras and understanding the challenges of calibration drift in real-world scenarios. Your ability to ensure timestamp integrity and tight time alignment across multiple sensors, including diagnosing and correcting time offsets, jitter, dropped frames, and clock synchronization issues in an onboard pipeline, will be critical for system performance.
• • We encourage the use of modern development tools and methodologies. Experience with AI coding agents and prompt engineering is desirable, as it can significantly accelerate your effectiveness and enhance codebase ownership, particularly in a tech lead capacity.
• • This role demands a high degree of autonomy, determination, and grit. You should be a proactive problem-solver, driven to make cutting-edge technology function flawlessly in challenging environments.
• • While not strictly mandatory, experience with GPU programming (CUDA, OpenCL) and graphics pipelines (Vulkan, OpenGL) would be a significant advantage, enabling you to optimize performance-critical components.
• • Furthermore, practical experience integrating software onto UAVs, understanding onboard constraints, and debugging in flight-test conditions, is highly desirable. An awareness of the current academic literature in 3D vision will also be beneficial for staying ahead of the curve.
• • We are looking for individuals who are passionate about solving real-world problems with advanced technology. You will be working in an international, world-class team of engineers and entrepreneurs, contributing to projects that range from operational collaborations to low-TRL research with government agencies.
• • You will have significant freedom in how you work and implement solutions, with a strong emphasis on project ownership. This is an opportunity to take technical risks, implement solutions the 'right' way, and iterate quickly with tight feedback loops. Learning and innovation are expected, and you will be recognized as the expert on the systems you build.
• • Your contributions will directly impact the development and deployment of our cutting-edge aerial robotics software, with opportunities to travel abroad and test your solutions in relevant, real-world environments. We are committed to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in autonomous systems.