Research Engineer

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Job Summary

The Gharib Group develops autonomous systems for uncrewed aircraft operating in unstructured outdoor environments. We are seeking a Research Engineer to build and deploy the perception and planning software that allows these aircraft to sense their surroundings, interpret what they observe, and decide where to fly next.

The role spans the full path from algorithm to flight. The Engineer will develop perception and decision-making algorithms, integrate them with onboard sensing and embedded computing, characterize and calibrate the sensors involved, and validate the results through testing in the laboratory and in the field. The aircraft carry visual and thermal imaging, inertial navigation, and onboard compute, with a link to a ground station for offboard processing and operator supervision.

This position suits an engineer who wants to see their work run on real hardware rather than in simulation alone, and who is comfortable moving between algorithm development, software integration, and hands-on field testing. It offers close collaboration with graduate researchers and broad exposure across the group’s aerial autonomy work.

Essential Job Duties

Perception and planning algorithms:

• Algorithms for onboard sensing, scene interpretation, and autonomous decision-making, including how prior map and terrain information informs flight planning.

Imaging and sensor work:

• Characterizing and calibrating onboard imaging sensors; relating sensor measurements to positions on the ground from aircraft pose and map data; visualization of results.

Onboard software and integration:

• Deploying algorithms to embedded compute on the aircraft; interfaces to the flight stack, sensors, and ground station; simulation and test infrastructure.

Flight testing and field campaigns:

• Aircraft operation, test planning, data collection, and assessing performance under real field conditions.

Documentation and reporting:

• Technical documentation, trade studies, and project reporting.

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor of Science in engineering, computer science, or a closely related field, or equivalent degree.
• Demonstrated experience developing computer vision or robotic perception software and running it on physical robot hardware (academic, research, and project experience counts).
• Programming in Python and C++; the Robot Operating System (ROS or ROS 2); computer vision libraries; Linux.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s degree in robotics, computer vision, or a related engineering field.
• Imaging sensors beyond conventional cameras — thermal or infrared, for example — including characterization and calibration.
• Planning under uncertainty — informative path planning or probabilistic and belief-space methods.
• Deploying software on embedded compute for robots — for example, NVIDIA Jetson, CUDA, TensorRT, Docker.

Required Documents

• Resume