Staff Autonomy Engineer (Drone)

Gather AI•Pittsburgh, PA

About The Position

Gather AI is seeking a Staff Autonomy Engineer (Drone) to own the core autonomy software stack for their drone platform. This role involves leading the design and implementation of perception, localization, and scanning pipelines that run on vehicle-mounted hardware in production warehouses. The engineer will work with hardware, field deployment, and ML teams to build reliable software for noisy, dynamic, and unforgiving environments. The work will directly impact the accuracy and reliability of customer-dependent inventory data. This is a Staff-level individual contributor role with significant technical ownership.

Requirements

7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 3 years building autonomy, robotics, or perception systems that run on physical hardware in production.
Strong C++ and Python, with experience writing software that runs on embedded or resource-constrained compute platforms.
Hands-on experience with computer vision pipelines including camera-based detection, localization, or tracking in real-world environments.
Experience building and debugging software on deployed systems, including log-based diagnosis and field iteration.
Comfort operating at Staff level: setting technical direction, making consequential architecture decisions, and taking end-to-end ownership of a system.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ROS2 or similar robotics middleware in a production context.
Background in warehouse, logistics, or industrial automation environments.
Familiarity with sensor fusion, calibration, or multi-camera systems.
Experience with SLAM, odometry, or other localization approaches on mobile platforms.

Responsibilities

Own the autonomy software stack for Gather products, including perception, localization, and inventory scanning pipelines running on vehicle-mounted embedded compute.
Contribute to the architecture of the product autonomy stack as the product scales to more vehicle types, facility layouts, and customer configurations.
Document existing systems.
Plan future revisions.
Contribute and lead to design improvements and testing.
Solve problems across the autonomy stack.
Design and implement algorithms that reliably detect, identify, and record inventory locations as forklifts and drones move through warehouse aisles under variable lighting, occlusion, and motion.
Improve scan accuracy and coverage through algorithmic improvements, better sensor integration, and tighter coordination with the ML perception models.
Build and maintain the software systems that manage scan triggering, location mapping, and data handoff to the cloud platform.
Collaborate with hardware and field teams to diagnose and resolve issues on deployed systems, using log data and field observations to drive improvements.