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. Were an early stage startup rapidly moving and growing.

General Qualifications

Deep love for America and passion for Wild West Systems 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.

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

Required Skills and Experience

• 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

Preferred Skills and Experience

• 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

Work Location

This role is assigned onsite at our Leander Texas -person work is required.

Benefits

We are always looking for good people! Wild West Systems is committed to providing its employees with competitive salaries and benefits to increase employee satisfaction and productivity.

Health Insurance: 100% coverage for employees 90% for spouse/family

Vision and Dental: 100% Coverage

401(k): Available to all employees

***We do not work with staffing companies. Direct applicants only***

Required Experience:

IC