Perception Systems Engineer

Job description

Job responsibilities

• Drive the perception system architecture and requirements baseline: decompose mission need into detection, range, field of regard, latency, and availability requirements, allocate them across sensing, compute, and…
• Own the sensor suite baseline and its configuration across platforms, including which modalities and part numbers are in the baseline for each aircraft variant, where they are installed, and the interfaces to the…
• Set and defend the sensing performance model: detection probability and false alarm rate against target size, reflectivity, range, aspect, illumination, and weather, built up from radiometry and detector performance,…
• Drive the verification and validation strategy for perception: verification plans, bench and hardware in the loop coverage, sensor characterization test, flight test objectives, data collection needs, and the evidence…
• Provide the technical authority at design and gate reviews, judging whether perception evidence is sufficient and coverage is complete, and holding the line when it is not
• Lead sensor trades that resolve real forks, framing the decision, defining the criteria, running the analysis, and documenting the result so it survives the people who made it
• Drive modularity and reuse so that perception ports across platforms, including sensor abstraction, interface stability under sensor substitution, and open mission system alignment
• Set the sensing engineering practice that others inherit: how we model performance, how we characterize a sensor, and what constitutes proof, so that each new effort starts from an established method rather than…

Job requirements

• B.S. or M.S. in Electrical Engineering, Optics, Physics, Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace, or a similar field, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of engineering experience on electro-optical, LiDAR, RADAR, or comparable sensing systems, including time as the technical owner of a sensing system through to fielded or flight demonstrated performance
• Demonstrated depth in multi-modal sensor architecture and sensor selection, with a working command of the detection physics that bounds each one
• Demonstrated experience owning system architecture and interface definition for a sensing system, including the interfaces to compute, to autonomy consumers, and to the vehicle
• Ability to exercise extremely high ownership over a complex system across design, integration, test, and flight test
• Demonstrated experience specifying and verifying sensing performance quantitatively, including detection and false alarm characterization, range performance analysis, and validation of a model against measured data
• Working command of electro-optical, LiDAR, and/or RADAR system engineering fundamentals: radiometry and link budgets, detector and optics selection, noise and sensitivity metrics such as NETD and NEP, resolution and…
• Demonstrated experience with the systems engineering rigor this role sits on: requirements management, traceability to verification, ICDs, and technical performance measures as a managed baseline