Lodestar Space
Software Engineer: Perception
Los Angeles, US · Senior · Full-time
Work authorization required$115k-$140kDetected 36 days ago
AlgorithmsGitAWSGCPAzureCI/CDLinuxMachine LearningRoboticsCommunication
About the role
- Our flagship product MITHRIL is the critical hardware & software necessary to augment any off-the-shelf spacecraft with the ability to autonomously detect, characterise, and reversibly neutralise orbital threats.
- About the Job As a Software Engineer - Perception at Lodestar, you'll be joining the perception and machine vision teams to rapidly grow our vision and perception models at MITHRIL's center.
- We proudly have an "extreme ownership" oriented engineering culture.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop ML algorithms from the ground up, in addition to build on and optimizing our existing models for edge computing
- Further develop our robust methods for predicting relative pose of dynamic space targets in harsh and unpredictable visual environments
- Contribute to the design of realistic sensor models and digital twins to improve perception fidelity in mission scenarios
- Own perception tooling, model training infrastructure, and evaluation frameworks for ongoing development and deployment
- Collaborate across autonomy, estimation, and mission software teams to ensure perception fidelity, performance, and scalability
- Lodestar's mission is to develop the first "Protect and Defend" capability for high-value space assets in orbit.
- By building on the proven space heritage of our best-in-class satellite-bus partners and fully integrating MITHRIL as a single platform, we deliver a fully autonomous end-to-end protection spacecraft service.
- You'll focus on researching and building algorithms to detect, classify and understand unknown space targets in real-time.
Requirements
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in, AI/ML, Computer Science, Robotics, a related field, or equivalent experience
- Track record optimizing neural networks and geometric algorithms using CUDA kernels, TensorRT, or other GPU acceleration frameworks
- Experience with distributed training and cloud-based scaling of ML models (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
- Experience with Linux, Git, and CI/CD pipelines
- Strong understanding of networking and communication protocols for distributed autonomy systems
Nice to have
- Preferred Skills & Experience
Compensation
- bands are determined by role, level, location, and alignment with market data.
- Individual level and base pay is determined on a case-by-case basis and may vary based on job-related skills, education, experience, technical capabilities and internal equity.
- In addition to base salary, for full-time hires, you may also be eligible for long-term incentives, in the form of stock options, and access to medical, vision and dental coverage, as well as access to a 401(k) retirement plan.
- (E1) Junior Software Engineer: $115,000 - $140,000 / year
- (E2) Software Engineer: $140,000 - $180,000 / year
- (E3) Senior Software Engineer: Competitive
Benefits
- As a Software Engineer - Perception at Lodestar, you'll be joining the perception and machine vision teams to rapidly grow our vision and perception models at MITHRIL's center.
- By combining computer vision, image processing and machine learning, you'll develop custom models - providing the foundation for autonomous decision-making in complex and uncertain space environments.
- Meaningful equity incentives as part of our employee option pool
- Flexible PTO with generous paid vacation, holidays, and sick leave
- Comprehensive medical, dental & vision coverage
Visa & Work Authorization
- citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U
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This listing is sourced directly from Lodestar Space's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.