AI/Perception Lead Engineer

Wild West Systems•Great Neck Plaza, NY

1d•Onsite

About The Position

AI / Perception Lead Engineer Wild West Systems is an American defense technology company with the mission to equip the civilized world with superior and affordable arms and advanced technologies – to dominate the battlefield of present and future threats, in a new era of asymmetrical warfare. We fuse versatile domain experience with novel approach and creativity to change the paradigm of defense – both for military arenas and civilian soft targets. We're an early stage startup, rapidly moving and growing. General Qualifications Deep love for America and passion for Wild West System's mission. Self-starter, capable of performing tasks as an individual as well as working well in a team. Servant-leader mentality, extreme ownership, willing to participate in different and rapidly changing projects in a dynamic environment. Bias for action. ITAR REQUIREMENT: To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here. Position Overview We are seeking an AI / Perception Lead Engineer to own and deliver the perception layer of our autonomy stack. This is a high-impact role focused on building real-time computer vision and sensor fusion systems that operate reliably on constrained edge hardware in dynamic environments. This is not a research-only role. You will be responsible for taking perception systems from concept → prototype → field deployment, working across software, hardware, and real-world testing.

Requirements

Strong experience with modern CV models (YOLO, transformers, tracking systems)
Experience training, fine-tuning, and deploying models
Experience with edge inference optimization (TensorRT, ONNX, etc.)
Strong Python + C++ (or Rust) skills
Experience working with real-time video pipelines

Nice To Haves

Experience with Hailo or similar accelerators
Experience with multi-object tracking (ByteTrack, DeepSORT)
Experience with Roboflow or similar dataset pipelines
Experience deploying models on embedded systems

Responsibilities

Develop and deploy real-time object detection, classification, and tracking systems
Optimize models for edge deployment (Hailo, Jetson, ARM, etc.)
Build multi-sensor perception pipelines (camera, lidar, etc.)
Improve robustness under real-world conditions (motion blur, occlusion, lighting)
Integrate perception outputs into downstream autonomy systems