Staff Engineer – Perception (Robotics)

About the role

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the development of perception and navigation capabilities for autonomous aircraft operating in GNSS‑denied environments. The role focuses on visual‑inertial odometry, visual SLAM, and real‑time sensor‑fusion on embedded platforms.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and deploy VIO, visual SLAM, visual localization and vision‑based navigation algorithms for autonomous aircraft.
• Build robust state‑estimation and sensor‑fusion pipelines using cameras, IMUs and other onboard sensors.
• Implement geometric computer‑vision components such as feature tracking, optical flow, pose estimation, triangulation and visual localization.
• Develop geo‑localization and map‑matching using satellite, aerial or orthophoto imagery.
• Integrate perception and navigation software with flight‑control and autonomy systems and optimise for real‑time operation on embedded Linux.

Required profile

• Significant hands‑on experience developing robotics perception or navigation systems.
• Deep expertise in VIO, visual SLAM, vision‑based navigation and GNSS‑denied localisation.
• Strong C++ development skills and extensive experience in Linux environments.
• Experience deploying perception or navigation capabilities on UAS/UAV platforms.

Required skills

• Camera‑IMU sensor fusion, state estimation, calibration and time synchronization.
• Geometric computer‑vision techniques: feature tracking, optical flow, pose estimation, triangulation.
• Embedded‑Linux development, real‑time video pipelines (GStreamer, V4L2).
• Optimization for NVIDIA Jetson/Orin platforms, including CUDA and TensorRT.
• Familiarity with libraries such as OpenVINS, VINS‑Fusion, ORB‑SLAM3, GTSAM, Ceres Solver, OpenCV, Kalibr.