Senior Perception & Localization Engineer

Job Description

Senior Perception & Localization Engineer

Chicago area (Northbrook, IL) | On site | Up to $180k+ equity | Visa sponsorship and relocation support

The company

A well funded robotics company building AI powered robots. Their robots are already deployed and doing real work, and the engineering team is growing.

The role

You’ll own how the robots sense and understand the world. That means the sensors on every robot, and the pipeline that turns their data into one trusted picture of the world: where everything really is, what state it’s in, and how sure we are.

Real sites are dusty, the light keeps changing, and the real world never quite matches the plans. Your system finds that gap, down to tool tolerance.

You’ll be one of three senior technical leads, alongside Task Planning and Robot Learning. The planner and the learned skills both depend on your world model being right.

What you’ll do

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• Define the sensor suite for each robot platform: cameras, lidar, force/torque, tactile, IMU and process sensors
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• Choose sensor placement for coverage, occlusion and changing light
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• Own calibration (intrinsic, extrinsic, hand eye, camera to lidar) and keep it reliable through tool changes and daily use
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• Own time sync across every sensor, robot state and teleop stream
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• Build the sensor data pipeline: capture, streaming, compression and logging at rate
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• Build sensor fusion and localisation, so mobile robots know where they are relative to the structure, not just a map
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• Design the world model: every element tied to CAD / BIM models, with its position, uncertainty and status
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• Register the plans to the as built, to tool tolerance
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• Monitor sensor health and catch drift before it affects a task
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• Set perception architecture and mentor engineers, while still writing production code and testing on real robots every week
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What you’ll bring

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• 5+ years building perception, localisation or sensor fusion for robots or autonomous vehicles deployed in the real world
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• Hands on multi sensor calibration and fusion: cameras, lidar, IMU, GNSS
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• State estimation: Kalman filters, factor graphs (GTSAM or similar), SLAM
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• Point cloud processing and registration
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• Strong C++ and Python, ROS2, Linux, Docker, CI/CD
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• Real ownership: you built it, not just contributed to it
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• Experience setting technical direction and mentoring engineers
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Nice to have

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• MS or PhD in Robotics, CS, EE or a related field
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• Harsh or outdoor environments: construction, mining, agriculture, rail, subsea, off road
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• Registering maps, CAD or BIM models to real world scans
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• Force/torque or tactile sensing for manipulation
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• Sensor integration across multiple robot platforms
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• Safety critical or high integrity localisation
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Please note: this role is about sensors and state estimation on real hardware. Image classification or deep learning experience alone is not a fit.

What’s on offer

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• Base salary up to $200k
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• Equity
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• Comprehensive benefits
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• Visa sponsorship and relocation support
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• Direct access to robots, sensors and manufacturing environments every week
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