Perception Hardware Integration Engineer

About the Team

The Seeker Team builds the eyes and the targeting logic of our weapon system: a low-cost, mass-producible, multimodal missile seeker that leans on commercial supply chains where they outperform the defense legacy, with supply-chain security engineered in from day one. On a modern missile, the seeker is 40 to 60% of unit cost and often drives overly long delivery cycles; accordingly, the seeker team is at the tip of the spear for delivering value to our customers and to the taxpayer.

Seeker design has exactly two real constraints: physics and mission. Supply chain, vendor lead time, qualification cost, "the way it's always been done": none of that stops us. We are a small, deeply technical team that drives capability through ingenuity and bias for action and ships hardware that flies. This is a wear-many-hats environment where you must be comfortable "building the airplane in flight" and stepping well outside your comfort zone; a narrowly scoped role with clean handoffs is not what this team offers.

This is an AI-native team. Through fluent use of cutting-edge agentic coding tools, one engineer here consistently out-delivers a much larger conventional team. You will have opinions about where these tools help and where they do not, provide governance input, and build AI into your workflow from day one.

About the Role

You own the seeker as a working system, from the first prototype on the bench to every unit that follows. You take the capability architecture (cameras, compute, IMUs, power) and a specified, tested optical assembly, and make one working seeker out of them: integrated, brought up, calibrated, and qualified. First light on the first article is yours, and so is the discipline that makes build ten identical to build nine. You report to the seeker lead and work in tight partnership with the opto-mechanical engineer: they own how well the seeker sees; you own the seeker itself. This is a role for an engineer who has fielded complete camera or electro-optical products end to end, in an environment where escapes are not an option. Prior thermal infrared experience is preferred, but not strictly required.

What You'll Do

• Own the physical integration of the seeker: master CAD, packaging, harnessing, connectors, and assembly sequence, inside the mass, volume, power, and cost budgets.
• Own the seeker build: the lens-to-FPA marriage, electronics integration, first-article bring-up, and system-level debug.
• Run the detector trade: vendor engagement, eval-kit bring-up, and bench characterization of candidate FPAs.
• Own calibration: non-uniformity correction, bad-pixel maps, radiometric cal, and boresight, developed on the first articles and pipelined to every unit that follows.
• Own seeker test and acceptance: stations and instrumentation you can prove trustworthy, and the data package that shows each unit performs.
• Own seeker-level environmental qualification campaigns, and run failures to root cause.
• Own the seeker supply chain and test infrastructure: every purchased item rides your system.
• Automate everything you touch twice, and build so the next unit is the same as the last.

Skills We're Hiring For

• B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Optical Engineering, Physics, Electrical Engineering, or related.
• 8+ years of hands-on integration of precision imaging or electro-optical hardware, from component selection through qualification.
• Demonstrated mastery of a complete imaging chain: sensor and lens selection against performance requirements (SNR, QE, pixel pitch, MTF), optics, mechanics, electronics, and software.
• Rapid prototype iteration: breadboard-to-brassboard builds, quick-turn fabrication, and test rigs improvised from eval kits and what's on the bench.
• System-level debug across domains: can chase an image-quality fault through optics, electronics, firmware, and thermal to root cause.
• Experimental discipline: characterization campaigns, optical alignment and metrology fundamentals, instrumentation you can trust, and data that separates signal from setup artifact.
• Strong CAD and GD&T; packaging dense assemblies into tight envelopes; comfortable at an electronics bench.
• Test automation in Python or similar; daily use of agentic coding tools (Claude Code or similar).

Bonus Points For

• LWIR or MWIR camera integration or calibration experience.
• Environmental qualification of flight, airborne, or munition-class hardware.
• High-volume manufacturing background with production quality statistics (Gage R&R, Cpk, yield and escape analysis).
• Hobbyist drone build and flight experience.