Computer Vision Engineer

Skyways designs, builds, and operates fully autonomous long-range cargo aircraft. Founded in 2017, the company has spent the last eight years developing and deploying autonomous logistics systems for real-world operations.Our V2 aircraft carries 30 lbs up to 500 miles, while our next-generation V3 carries 100 lbs over 1,000+ miles with 20+ hours of endurance. Both use a hybrid-electric architecture that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like a plane, enabling long-range autonomous delivery without traditional runway infrastructure.Today, Skyways aircraft operate across three continents in controlled national airspace under FAA oversight and in support of U.S. military operations. We are transitioning from prototype development to full-rate production and scaling toward large autonomous cargo fleets.Backed by Y Combinator and a $37M AFWERX STRATFI award from the U.S. Air Force, Skyways is creating a new form of transportation to advance our civilization from Austin, Texas.The OpportunitySkyways aircraft have to land themselves, every time, often in places they have never seen before. This role builds the perception that makes that possible.You will build core pieces of the onboard vision system that puts the aircraft safely on the ground in two modes: target-based precision landing, where the aircraft locks onto a known marker and nails its touchdown, and targetless landing, where there is no marker and the aircraft has to read the terrain itself, find a safe spot, and reject the bad ones. This is hard, high-stakes perception running in real time at the edge, and it directly decides whether a mission ends in a clean delivery or a failure. You will own major components of this stack, work close to the metal and close to the flight line, and turn real flight data into a system that gets more reliable with every sortie.We are looking for someone who has already shipped perception on a real platform that moves through the world, and who wants their work measured in successful landings, not benchmarks.What You'll Do:Own major components of the landing perception stack: target detection and relative pose estimation for marker-based landing, or safe-zone selection, hazard, and slope detection for targetless landingBuild real-time CV inference that runs within the compute, power, and latency budget of an embedded flight systemDevelop the perception pipeline across detection, tracking, segmentation, and depth or stereo, tuned for the conditions the aircraft actually flies inFuse camera with depth, stereo, or LiDAR where it improves robustnessTurn flight data, telemetry, and field failures into model and pipeline improvements through a tight iteration loopContribute to the datasets, evaluation, and regression tooling that keep landing performance honest across releasesDebug real-world perception failures and close the gap between simulation, ground testing, and live flightWork side by side with autonomy, GNC, and flight operations to integrate perception into the full landing sequenceWhat You'll Bring:Direct, hands-on perception work on autonomous landing or a closely adjacent problem: target detection and relative pose, or safe-zone and hazard selection from terrain and depth.3+ years post-grad shipping production CV software, with strong CS fundamentals across algorithms, data structures, and low-level reasoningProduction C++ for real-time inference on embedded or resource-constrained targets, plus Python for training pipelines and toolingA track record of taking perception from prototype through deployment and iteration on a real system, not research aloneEngineering hygiene to move fast in a live codebase: Git, testing discipline, CI/CD, clean abstractionsComfort debugging at the system level using logs, telemetry, and real-world dataBonus Points If You Have:Experience with autonomous aircraft, UAS, or other aerial platformsDepth, stereo, or LiDAR fusion in productionReal-time or embedded systems experience, including GPU or accelerator optimizationFamiliarity with ROS2 or similar robotics frameworksExperience deploying perception or ML to compute-constrained environmentsWant to join our mission? Apply to learn more!Due to U.S. government contract requirements, this role is limited to U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, or candidates from specific countries authorized under applicable export control regulations.Skyways is an Equal Opportunity employer committed to diversity in the workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status or any other factor protected by applicable local, state or federal laws.