Lead Autonomy Engineer (Defence)
A high-growth physical AI and autonomy business is expanding its European engineering capability and is looking for a Defence Autonomy Engineer to help lead the development of mission-critical autonomy solutions for defence customers.
This is a hands-on technical role working across perception, planning, and system architecture. You’ll operate close to real-world deployment, building high-performance autonomy software that moves beyond prototype into production environments.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Designing, developing, and verifying high-performance autonomy solutions
- Building and deploying state-of-the-art ML models for defence use cases
- Developing perception and planning algorithms for real-world systems
- Optimising model and system performance for production environments
- Translating product requirements into robust technical solutions
- Collaborating closely with cross-functional engineering and product teams
- Mentoring junior engineers and contributing to team growth
- Driving continuous improvement, testing, and documentation standards
What They’re Looking For
- Proven experience developing autonomous systems in aerospace or defence
- Strong end-to-end deep learning development experience
- Expertise across areas such as:
- Modelling
- Data/input pipelines
- Evaluation and deployment
- Model optimisation
- 5+ years building production-grade software using modern practices
- Strong C++ or Python (with working C++ capability)
- UK Security Clearance
Nice to Have
- Publications in computer vision, robotics, or NLP
- Experience with UAVs
- Experience improving system-in-the-loop performance
Travel
- Occasional travel to UK/international offices and customer sites as required