Embedded System Lead Engineer Pelagon (backed by Hexa)

The sea is the physical layer of the economythe conduit for our energy communications and trade. It is also Europes exposed flank. Pelagon is building the answer.

Founded by Aymeric (serial deeptech entrepreneur; founded & exited Scortex Leading AI solution for manufacturing quality) and Gauthier (Navy officer and McKinsey) Pelagon is building a foundational multimodal acoustic model for autonomous maritime protection (underwater and surface) in service of European sovereignty. It will be deployed on a distributed autonomous network of vectors (UUVs buoys sailbuoys seabed) to provide real-time understanding of underwater threats.

France and Europe have world-class acoustic engineers and a long history in underwater warfare. By bridging this expertise with modern physical-AI strategies (as seen in autonomous driving and robotics). Europe is still missing its naval NeoPrime Pelagon aims to become to lead the way in autonomous marine protectionfrom detection to interceptionpartnering with leading navies primes and neo-primes while also operating its own fleet as a service.

Pelagon is backed by Hexa the pioneer startup studio in Europe which has launched 35 companies including unicorns like Front Aircall and Spendesk combining 230m ARR and 750m raised.

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The role**

As Embedded System Lead Engineer you take end-to-end technical ownership of the hardware electronics and embedded stack across a small family of autonomous maritime platforms some operating on the surface some beneath it.

What they share matters more than what sets them apart: each must persist at sea for long stretches sense its surroundings run our AI on-device and report back intelligently all while surviving a brutal environment on a very tight energy budget.

You will lead their technical development from architecture and component selection through bring-up integration sea trials and iteration. Youll set the engineering bar for the platforms team and shape how we build for years to come.

These platforms exist to carry one thing into the water: our AI. Pelagon trains high-performance detection models in-house on its own stack and those models have to run on-device at the edge on a razor-thin power budget then push results back to our operations center. Designing the compute-and-power architecture that makes this possible is the heart of the role.

The mandate is simple and uncompromising: get reliable hardware in the water fast and start collecting data. Every week of persistent at-sea operation compounds. The hardware is the gate to all of it.

What youll own

• Common system architecture across the platforms: power sensing compute and communications.

• The edge-AI compute platform selecting and integrating the processors and accelerators that run our in-house detection models on-device and extracting maximum inference from every milliwatt.

• Electronics design and integration power distribution battery systems motor/thruster control sensor interfaces (acoustic pressure IMU GNSS AIS).

• The embedded software and autopilot stack firmware and the low-level glue that makes autonomy reliable in a brutal wet salty environment.

• Robustness and efficiency engineering: watertight integrity power budgets and endurance thermal behaviour EMC and graceful failure modes far from shore.

• Hands-on bring-up and sea trials youll be on the dock and on the boat not just at the bench.

• Vendor and component decisions and the build-up of our test and manufacturing practices as we scale from prototype to fielded units.

The hard problems youll be solving

These are genuinely difficult and thats the point:

• Persistence with a finite power budget. Endurance is everything for a surveillance node squeezing weeks of useful operation out of a sealed ship-deployable platform is a relentless optimization problem across power compute and duty-cycling.

• Reliability with no one to fix it. A system at sea has to fail safe and recover on its own. There is no field technician at 30 nm offshore in a 2 m swell.

• Running real AI at the edge on almost no power. This is the defining challenge of the role. Our in-house models have to run inference on-device in real time on platforms with a razor-thin energy budget then sense sleep and wake intelligently to stretch endurance from hours into weeks. Getting high-performance ML to live within milliwatts is what makes the entire system possible.

• Sensing in a hostile medium. The ocean fights you at every turn pressure corrosion biofouling acoustic noise intermittent comms and the hardware has to keep sensing and computing through all of it.

• Speed without fragility. We are building fast toward sea trials but a demonstrator that breaks doesnt generate data. Youll have to find the line between moving quickly and building things that survive the ocean.

Why join now

• Founding ownership. Youll be one of the first engineers and will define the technical foundation of the company. Meaningful equity comes with that.

• A mission with weight. This is hardware that protects critical infrastructure and Europes maritime space.

• Real things in the real ocean fast. Youll see your work in the water within weeks not years.

• AI-first at the edge in the real world. We train our own models and run them where it counts: in the water on the device. Youll be solving the edge-ML and power problems most companies only talk about.

• A sovereign European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with strong NATO and EU policy momentum behind it.