Senior Perception Engineer (Aerospace)

Location: Torrance, California, United States

Salary: $163,500–$228,500 USD base salary

Company

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

What you will do

• Develop detection, classification, image-space tracking, and aimpoint selection for small, low-contrast targets in cluttered terrain.
• Extend perception capabilities to EO, IR, thermal, and low-light imaging, including sensor integration and imagery collection.
• Build onboard target search and candidate-generation systems for operator-authorized engagements over degraded communications links.
• Discriminate valid targets from civilian, friendly, and neutral objects while defining detection operating points with state-estimation and engagement-authorization owners.
• Define perception output contracts, calibrated confidence, degraded-sensor signaling, and evaluation and regression cases against logged flight data.
• Deploy perception software to embedded compute while managing accuracy, latency, and end-to-end performance budgets; provide senior design and code review.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional experience developing production computer vision or perception software from prototype through fielded deployment.
• 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.
• Experience with classical and learned perception, including tracking, feature matching, data association, detection, and classification networks.
• Experience deploying neural networks to embedded accelerators, including quantization and accuracy-latency characterization.
• Working knowledge of EO and IR/thermal imaging, camera calibration, sensor synchronization, uncertainty representation, and evaluation metrics for detection and tracking.

Nice to have

• Experience with air-to-ground EO/IR imagery, airborne target acquisition, seeker systems, or automatic target recognition.
• Experience selecting or integrating thermal/LWIR sensors and evaluating imaging and procurement trade-offs.
• Experience building fleet data engines for log capture, indexing, dataset versioning, labeling, and model-training workflows.

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.
• Highly competitive equity grants are included in the total compensation package.
• Equal opportunity employment is provided without discrimination based on protected characteristics.