Perception Lead (Computer Vision)

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Salary: $133,500–$187,000 USD per year base salary, with equity grants considered part of total compensation.

Company

hirify.global is a defense technology startup designing and manufacturing high-performance unmanned systems for modern battlefield operations.

What you will do

• Own the architecture, roadmap, and delivery of a configurable perception stack across all unmanned aircraft platforms.
• Lead and grow a small perception engineering team through hiring, mentorship, and technical reviews while contributing hands-on to the software.
• Deliver detection, recognition, and image-space tracking that maintains and reacquires targets in clutter, glare, low light, occlusion, thermal imagery, and degraded communication conditions.
• Define perception output contracts, calibrated confidence, degraded-detection signaling, and operating points with state estimation and engagement authorization owners.
• Guide the transition from classical computer vision to learned detection and classification while retaining deterministic fallbacks and rigorous regression evaluation.
• Deploy and optimize perception software on constrained onboard compute, including embedded accelerators and end-to-end latency budgets.

Requirements

• 6+ years developing production computer vision or perception software, including 2+ years leading a team or technical program while remaining hands-on.
• Experience delivering perception software on physical systems operating in uncontrolled outdoor environments, such as unmanned aircraft, robotics, autonomous vehicles, or aerospace platforms.
• Expert proficiency in C++ and Python with production experience under real-time or resource-constrained requirements.
• Strong knowledge of classical and learned perception, including tracking, feature matching, data association, detection, and classification networks.
• Experience deploying neural networks to embedded accelerators such as NVIDIA Jetson, TensorRT, Qualcomm, or Hailo, including quantization and accuracy/latency characterization.
• Experience with EO and IR/thermal imaging, camera calibration, small-object detection, perception evaluation, sensor synchronization, coordinate frames, and uncertainty representation.

Nice to have

• Experience selecting and integrating thermal/LWIR sensors and managing their imaging and procurement trade-offs.
• Experience building fleet data engines for log capture, indexing, dataset versioning, labeling, and model training.
• Working familiarity with state estimation and sensor fusion, including visual-inertial odometry or Kalman filtering.
• Experience with flight or field test operations, instrumented test articles, range operations, and log recovery.

Culture & Benefits

• Fast-paced, hands-on startup environment focused on moving systems from design to deployment.
• Work on unmanned systems tested in combat and built for large-scale production.
• Competitive equity grants as part of the total compensation package.
• Equal opportunity employment without regard to protected characteristics.