PERCEPTION ENGINEER – MULTI-ROBOT AUTONOMY
Location: Cambridge, UK. Hybrid with regular on-site work.
Salary: £80,000 – £100,000 plus equity.
Overview
An early-stage autonomy company is hiring a Founding Perception Engineer to build the perception layer for a multi-robot autonomy platform.
The system enables robotic teams to understand, reason about, and operate within complex environments, including degraded sensing and communications.
This is a founding-level role with ownership of perception architecture, from raw sensor inputs through to structured world models used for decision-making.
The work focuses on robustness, interpretability, and real-world deployment rather than isolated research outputs.
Role Responsibilities
You own the end-to-end perception stack used across a heterogeneous fleet of robots.
Key responsibilities include:
• Design and implementation of perception pipelines that convert raw sensor data into structured world representations.
• Multi-sensor fusion across cameras, LiDAR, GNSS, and IMU.
• Probabilistic reasoning under uncertainty and partial observability.
• Maintaining spatial and temporal consistency across distributed robotic agents.
• Integration of perception outputs with behaviour and planning systems.
• Development of evaluation, validation, and iteration workflows using simulation and real-world data.
• Close collaboration with Behaviour, Systems, and Platform engineers to define clean interfaces and APIs.
• Contributing to the perception roadmap and long-term autonomy architecture.
Technical Skillset
The ideal candidate brings:
• Strong background in robotic perception, computer vision, or autonomy systems.
• Experience building full perception pipelines rather than isolated models.
• Solid understanding of sensor fusion and uncertainty modelling.
• Familiarity with ROS 2 and perception tooling within its ecosystem.
• Experience working with simulation environments such as Isaac Lab, Gazebo, MuJoCo, or similar.
• Production-quality programming skills in C++ and Python.
Profile and Mindset
This role suits someone who:
• Enjoys ownership and architectural responsibility.
• Values clarity, robustness, and explainability in perception systems.
• Is comfortable working in early-stage, research-heavy environments.
• Wants their work to directly influence robotic decision-making.
• Enjoys collaborating across disciplines to solve system-level problems.
Working Style and Expectations
• High ownership during early roadmap definition and execution.
• Regular on-site collaboration in Cambridge.
• Small, senior technical team with direct access to founders.
• Focus on delivering capability rather than publishing outputs.
Compensation and Upside
• Competitive base salary.
• Meaningful equity aligned with early impact.
• Opportunity to define perception foundations for a long-term autonomy platform.