Senior Perception Engineer

atomicSan Francisco, CASauron

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Opens the official atomic careers page

Salary

$220K – $260K

Job type

Full-time

Experience

Senior · 5+ yrs

Posted

2 Oct 2026

Status

Open · checked 7d ago

About this role

This role suits an experienced engineer with a strong background in perception, computer vision, and safety-critical hardware systems who wants to lead technical direction in San Francisco. Atomic is hiring a Senior Perception Engineer to build the foundational perception system for Sauron, a home security company located in San Francisco, CA.

Role Overview

The Senior Perception Engineer will own the perception domain for Sauron, ensuring hardware operates reliably across diverse environmental conditions such as darkness and adverse weather. This position sets the technical direction for sensing, inference, model versus system decisions, and measurable production readiness. The engineer balances accuracy, latency, and cost tradeoffs while coding core features and serving as the primary authority for perception capabilities.

Key Responsibilities

Evolve pipeline architecture to support changing camera configurations without interrupting live video or losing object identity.

Establish boundaries between compiled services and inference graphs to maximize performance ceilings.

Own end-to-end perception quality by establishing evaluation data, regression harnesses, and defensible model choices.

Maximize sensor value by fusing observations and maintaining robustness against occlusion, poor lighting, and evasion.

Transition services from basic functionality to trustworthy unattended operation with failure detection and graceful degradation.

Utilize deployment data to close the loop from the field and build repeatable dataset and evaluation infrastructure.

Lead perception efforts, review complex changes, and define interfaces between perception and adjacent product teams.

Requirements

Around 5+ years building production systems, including several at staff scope with system architecture ownership.

Professional experience with perception or machine learning for hardware products within a safety-critical field like aerospace, robotics, medical devices, autonomous vehicles, or physical security.

Deep modern C++ expertise, specifically C++20 codebases utilizing Abseil, gRPC, and CMake, with comfort managing lifetime, threading, and shutdown semantics.

Practical GStreamer or media-pipeline experience including pads, probes, caps negotiation, and bus messages.

Shipped applied computer vision systems such as multi-object tracking, re-identification, or multi-camera association.

Strong foundation in linear algebra, optimization, statistics, and algorithms.

Deep-learning lifecycle experience utilizing PyTorch or equivalent frameworks, custom layers, network optimization for edge compute, and reproducible evaluation.

GPU inference experience using TensorRT engines, batching, fp16, and latency profiling.

Edge computing debugging capabilities and Python fluency for load-bearing logic.

Nice to Have

Production experience with NVIDIA Jetson, JetPack, L4T, Yocto images, or aarch64 cross-building.

Background in building multi-camera tracking systems.

Video surveillance, VMS, or ONVIF/RTSP integrations.

GPU architecture and CUDA programming knowledge.

Familiarity with Vision-Language Models and multi-modal models for semantic scene understanding.

Experience owning model evaluation metrics and datasets.

Skills and Tools

C++20

Python

PyTorch

GStreamer

TensorRT

CUDA

Abseil

gRPC

CMake

NVIDIA Jetson

Salary and Benefits

Salary range of $220K to $260K

Equity offerings included

About the Company

Sauron is a home security company incubated by serial entrepreneur Kevin Hartz and Atomic. Backed by an $18M seed round from venture capital firms and angel investors including 8VC and Flock Safety CEO Garret Langley, the company develops next-generation home protection technology utilizing artificial intelligence, sensor technology, and nonlethal deterrence.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should apply on the official company careers page.

Skills and tech stack

C++Python PyTorch GStreamer TensorRT CUDA Abseil gRPC CMake NVIDIA Jetson Computer Vision Deep Learning Machine Learning

Questions candidates ask

What is the salary range for this role?

The salary ranges from $220K to $260K and includes equity offers.

Where is the position located?

The position is located in San Francisco, CA.

How many years of experience are required?

The role requires around 5+ years of experience building production systems, with several years at staff scope.

What programming languages and frameworks are used?

The tech stack includes modern C++ (C++20), Python, PyTorch, GStreamer, TensorRT, CUDA, Abseil, gRPC, and CMake.

Who incubated the company behind this role?

Sauron was incubated by serial entrepreneur Kevin Hartz and Atomic.

Ready to apply?

The application is on the official atomic careers page.

Apply on company site