AI / Perception Engineer
2 - 5 years
California, United States
Full-time
Remote
1 month ago
About the role
About TerraFirma Robotics
TerraFirma Robotics is developing autonomous drone-based systems and data products for Earth monitoring and environmental intelligence. Our work spans robotics, edge AI, sensing, autonomy, and digital twin infrastructure. We care about technical rigor, thoughtful execution, and building systems that are useful in the real world, not just impressive in a demo.
About the Role
This role is for an engineer who wants to contribute meaningfully in a small, highly collaborative environment. You’ll work on core technical problems, help shape implementation decisions, and partner across disciplines to move systems from concept to reliable execution. We value clear thinking, sound engineering judgment, and a willingness to work across boundaries when needed.
Compensation: Full-time salary + equity option
Start Date: May 1, 2026
The Role
You own the perception stack that gives our drone eyes and understanding. From visual odometry and safety object detection to edge-ready scene understanding, you build and optimize the models that run on Jetson-class hardware and produce the autonomy signals the rest of the stack depends on.
What You'll Do
Requirements
Preferred
Why TerraFirma
Compensation and benefits vary by role, level, and location, and will be discussed during the process.
Equal Opportunity
TerraFirma Robotics is developing autonomous drone-based systems and data products for Earth monitoring and environmental intelligence. Our work spans robotics, edge AI, sensing, autonomy, and digital twin infrastructure. We care about technical rigor, thoughtful execution, and building systems that are useful in the real world, not just impressive in a demo.
About the Role
This role is for an engineer who wants to contribute meaningfully in a small, highly collaborative environment. You’ll work on core technical problems, help shape implementation decisions, and partner across disciplines to move systems from concept to reliable execution. We value clear thinking, sound engineering judgment, and a willingness to work across boundaries when needed.
Compensation: Full-time salary + equity option
Start Date: May 1, 2026
The Role
You own the perception stack that gives our drone eyes and understanding. From visual odometry and safety object detection to edge-ready scene understanding, you build and optimize the models that run on Jetson-class hardware and produce the autonomy signals the rest of the stack depends on.
What You'll Do
- Develop stereo visual-inertial odometry pipelines using NVIDIA cuVSLAM or similar approaches
- Build real-time 3D obstacle mapping for autonomous navigation
- Train and deploy safety detection models (people, vehicles, obstacles, landing zones)
- Deploy multimodal or vision-language models on edge hardware via TensorRT
- Support efficient edge-ready representations for constrained communications workflows
- Optimize multi-model inference to fit within Jetson-class memory, latency, and power budgets
Requirements
- Isaac ROS / ROS2 perception stack development
- NVIDIA TensorRT optimization: FP16/INT8 quantization, profiling
- Object detection: RT-DETR, YOLO-family, or similar edge-suitable architectures
- Edge deployment of multimodal or vision-language models on Jetson-class hardware
- Visual odometry (cuVSLAM, ORB-SLAM3, or similar)
- Camera calibration, synchronization, and perception-stack validation on real hardware
- ROS2 Humble: lifecycle nodes, QoS, multi-node systems
- Python + PyTorch for model development
Preferred
- NVIDIA Jetson Orin development experience
- nvblox real-time 3D reconstruction
- VQ-VAE or neural compression architectures
- TAO Toolkit for transfer learning
- Isaac Sim for synthetic training data
- Multi-model inference scheduling on shared GPU
Why TerraFirma
- Meaningful technical ownership from the start
- Close collaboration with a small, high-trust team
- Opportunity to work on multidisciplinary problems across robotics, AI, sensing, and systems
- A chance to help shape products and technical foundations early
- Competitive compensation, with benefits structured by role and hiring location
Compensation and benefits vary by role, level, and location, and will be discussed during the process.
Equal Opportunity
- TerraFirma Robotics is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates based on qualifications, capability, and potential to contribute. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or other protected status under applicable law.
Skills
Technology, Information and Internet