AI/Perception Lead Engineer

AI / Perception Lead Engineer

Company Overview

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.

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 location. In-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***

Salary: $250000 - $650000 per year