Computer Vision & Autonomy Engineer
- Autonomy
- Rehovot, Israel
- Full-time
Why this role exists
An aircraft roughly four times quieter than conventional eVTOLs earns something no one else has: permission to operate low, close, and often over real neighborhoods. That permission is worthless unless the vehicle can perceive the environment it has been invited into — urban canyons that degrade GNSS, rooftop landing sites measured in meters, and airspace shared with everything from birds to delivery drones. This role exists to build the perception and autonomy stack that converts our acoustic advantage into safe, routine flight over cities, including the precise state estimation that lets the vehicle hold the noise-optimal trajectories our acoustics team designs.
What you'll own
- Design and own multi-sensor fusion pipelines — camera, radar, GNSS/INS, and altimetry — delivering robust, high-rate state estimation through GNSS-degraded urban environments.
- Build the landing-site perception system: real-time detection, geometric assessment, and obstruction monitoring of vertiports and contingency sites during steep, noise-optimal approaches.
- Train, quantize, and deploy neural perception models on embedded flight compute, owning latency, memory, and power budgets down to the millisecond.
- Develop perception for detect-and-avoid: tracking non-cooperative traffic — small UAS, birds, general aviation — at ranges that preserve quiet, gentle avoidance maneuvers.
- Stand up the data engine: flight-test data collection, ground-truth generation, dataset curation, and automated regression of model performance across releases.
- Validate the perception stack in high-fidelity simulation, sensor replay, and hardware-in-the-loop benches before any algorithm touches the vehicle.
- Architect run-time monitoring and assurance around learned components, producing the evidence structure a certification authority can eventually accept.
- Support flight test campaigns end to end: integrate and calibrate sensors, analyze logs, and turn every anomaly into a fix or a documented limit within days.
What you bring
- M.Sc. in computer science, electrical engineering, or robotics — or a B.Sc. with equivalent demonstrated depth in perception systems.
- 4+ years building computer vision or perception software that shipped on real autonomous platforms — aerial, automotive, or robotic.
- Strong modern C++ (C++17 or later) for real-time perception pipelines, plus fluent Python for training, tooling, and analysis.
- Deep grounding in state estimation and sensor fusion: Kalman filtering variants, factor-graph optimization, or visual-inertial odometry in production.
- Solid geometric computer vision fundamentals — multi-camera calibration, epipolar geometry, structure from motion — not just learned end-to-end models.
- Hands-on deep learning for perception in PyTorch, including optimization and deployment to embedded accelerators via TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, or equivalent.
- Demonstrated rigor in validating perception systems: ground-truth methodology, failure-mode characterization, and metrics you would defend at a safety review.
- Field experience: you have debugged your own algorithms on real hardware outdoors, where the sun, the dust, and the multipath do not care about your test set.
Even better if
- Prior perception or autonomy work on eVTOL, UAM, or UAV programs, especially precision landing or detect-and-avoid systems.
- Familiarity with assurance approaches for learned components — ASTM F3269 run-time assurance, EASA's AI guidance, or ARP4754A-style system development context.
- Hands-on experience with radar, lidar, thermal, or event-based sensors beyond standard visible-light cameras.
- Publications or open-source contributions in CVPR, ICRA, RSS, or comparable venues.
- A track record at startup pace: standing up data pipelines, test rigs, and processes from nothing and iterating against flight-test deadlines.
Why this matters to quiet flight
Quiet is what lets this aircraft fly where others are banned; perception is what makes flying there defensible. If your stack can find a safe rooftop in a cluttered city, hold a trajectory through a GNSS-starved canyon, and prove it did so on every flight, urban airspace opens — for us first. If it cannot, the quietest aircraft ever built stays parked at the airport with everyone else's.
Life at AIRLIFT One
Small team, total ownership
No layers between you and the aircraft. You own your domain end-to-end — analysis, hardware, test — and your decisions fly.
Aviation breathing culture
Work alongside aviation geeks—engineers, innovators, and builders who are passionate about shaping the future of flight.
Stealth, not isolation
We don't publish yet, but we argue, test, and review relentlessly inside. Intellectual honesty is a daily practice, not a poster.
Built in Rehovot
We work on-site, around the hardware, in one of Israel's deepest engineering talent pools.
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