Perception Engineer

Perception Engineer – Mach Industries

Unlock the future of defense by designing, training, and deploying state‑of‑theart perception systems that enable autonomous navigation, targeting, and automatic target recognition. Your base salary will be based on skill and experience, with the range below.

$ / yr – $ / yr

Founded in 2022,
Mach Industries is a rapidly growing defense technology company focused on developing next‑generation autonomous defense platforms. With ~180 employees, we operate with startup agility while committing to scalable, decentralized solutions that enhance U.S. and allied strategic capabilities.

Our vision is to redefine the future of warfare through cutting‑edge manufacturing, rapid innovation, and unwavering national security focus. We solve next‑generation warfare challenges with lethal systems that deter kinetic conflict and protect global security.

Mach Industries is building an AI‑forward autonomy stack for contested environments where GPS and other sensing are unavailable or unreliable. As a Perception Engineer you will design, train, and deploy vision and multi‑sensor perception systems that enable navigation, targeting, and automatic target recognition on our product lines.

• Build and refine detection/segmentation/tracking architectures (CNN/Transformer) for EO/IR and multi‑spectral imagery; drive foundation‑scale datasets, training recipes, and robust generalization to long‑tail and degraded conditions.
• Stand up training/evaluation pipelines (PR/ROC, mAP, latency, robustness suites); implement continuous regression testing and model‑update loops from field data.
• Optimize models for real‑time embedded inference (quantization/pruning, Tensor
  
  RT/ONNX Runtime), profile CPU/GPU, and meet tight throughput/latency targets on Jetson‑class hardware.
• Combine vision outputs with auxiliary sensing (e.g., radar/LiDAR/RF cues) for confirm/deny, association, and track management using decision‑level fusion.
• Create visualization, triage, and root‑cause tools for rapid insight from simulation, HITL, and flight logs; define end‑to‑end test plans with hardware and flight teams.
• Instrument health metrics, drift detection, and graceful degradation; write clear tests and documentation mapped to performance requirements.
• Perform simulation‑based testing with high‑fidelity sensor models and validate algorithms using real‑world datasets.

• Production C++ on Linux and Python for ML/tooling; profiling, optimization, and rigorous testing discipline. Experience diving into CUDA backends for performance optimization and debugging.
• Strong with modern detection/segmentation/tracking (e.g., Retina/FCOS/DETR/Mask2D/Video models) and training/fine‑tuning in PyTorch.
• Proven experience building large, diverse datasets; labeling/QA pipelines; augmentation; experiment tracking; and reproducible training.
• Hands‑on with compression (INT8/FP16), runtime optimization, and real‑time constraints.
• EO/IR imagery experience and working with real flight/test data in challenging environments.
• 7+ years of experience with either a BS/MS/PhD in CS/EE/Robotics or similar, or equivalent experience; track record shipping ML models to production.

• Multi‑modal perception experience (EO/IR + radar/LiDAR/RF) at the decision or feature level.
• Robustness and safety: adversarial/rare‑event testing, long‑horizon reliability metrics, dataset shift/drift monitoring.
• Physics‑aware imaging: radiometric correction, NUC/FFC, atmospheric effects modeling; synthetic data/simulation for coverage.
• MLOps and data infra: SQL/Parquet, dataset/versioning tools, CI‑based validation; scalable training on multi‑GPU.

This position may require access to information protected under U.S. export control laws and regulations, including the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Please note that any offer employment may be conditioned on authorization to receive software or technology controlled under these U.S. export control laws and regulations without sponsorship for an export license.