Company
Saildrone
Annual salary
$300k – $380k/yr
Location
Alameda, CA
Listed
8d ago
- Experience:
- 8+ years
- Workplace:
- Hybrid, 3 days per week in the Alameda, CA office (on the waterfront, right on the lagoon where vehicles are deployed). Teams set their own conventions but the general expectation is 3 days in office, 2 days remote. No relocation support available.
- Equity:
- <p><strong>Competitive equity grants</strong> are a core part of Saildrone's compensation package, allowing you to participate in the long-term value you help create. Saildrone is a Series D+ company backed by investors including Lockheed Martin, Lux Capital, and Tribe Capital, with $299.5M in total funding raised. Specific equity details will be discussed during the offer stage.</p>
Hybrid in Alameda, CA.
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What you'll do
- Define the architecture and technical direction for Saildrone's entire perception stack, including sensor fusion, localization, tracking, mapping, and uncertainty estimation
- Take ownership of the hardest perception problems, integrating heterogeneous sensors (radar, cameras, novel maritime-specific modalities) into a coherent, reliable information stream for downstream autonomy
- Work closely with the autonomy, navigation, and applied ML teams to ensure perception outputs drive safe and effective vehicle behavior in complex ocean environments
- Translate research and algorithms into robust production capabilities within real-world constraints on sensors, compute (Nvidia Jetson SOC), latency, and harsh environmental conditions
- Lead technical direction for senior and staff engineers through architecture decisions, technical reviews, and hands-on problem solving, upleveling and upskilling the current perception team
- Guide data labeling strategies, ground truth dataset construction, and evaluation frameworks to continuously improve perception system performance
- Help expand the perception team over time, serving as a voice of technical leadership and authority in hiring and mentorship
What you need
- We need a Principal-level perception engineer with 8+ years of experience deploying perception systems on autonomous vehicles, robots, aerospace, or defense platforms. You should have deep expertise in sensor fusion, probabilistic estimation, and uncertainty modeling, with a proven track record of translating research-grade algorithms into reliable production systems running on constrained edge compute. Bonus points if you have experience with maritime or ocean-based autonomy, multiple sensor modalities (radar, camera, infrared), or have led perception architecture across multiple generations of an autonomous platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I apply for the Principal Software Engineer, Perception (US) role at Saildrone? +
Use the Apply for a referral button on this page to send us your LinkedIn and CV. If your experience fits, we'll introduce you to the recruiter filling this role. They'll email you to check you're interested, then put you forward for this job or others that suit you better. It's free.
What does this Saildrone role pay? +
The listing gives $300k – $380k/yr.
Is this role remote? +
The listing gives the location as Alameda, CA. Hybrid, 3 days per week in the Alameda, CA office (on the waterfront, right on the lagoon where vehicles are deployed). Teams set their own conventions but the general expectation is 3 days in office, 2 days remote. No relocation support available.
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