Who we are

Sphere Defense is a fully funded technology startup with the mission of providing allied countries with sovereign, effective and seamless autonomous countermeasures to neutralize todays’ and tomorrow’s aerial threats.

Sphere Defense was founded by industry veterans with previous successful exits, and is headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, in the heart of Europe.

About you

You are an experienced and highly-motivated Principal Perception Engineer, CV/ML that has architected, designed and implemented perception pipelines based on computer vision on mission-critical autonomous systems, ideally flying robots or homing missiles.

What you’ll do

• Be one of the first members of a high-performing team, designing and developing autonomous countermeasures to protect allied countries from aerial threats

• Own, design, develop, document and test state of the art perception pipelines based on vision and other data for situational awareness, detection, identification and tracking of targets

• Integrate, evaluate and fuse data coming from EO/IR, IMUs, radars and other sources

• Be hands-on, working close to the hardware when needed during development and tests

• Draft and review documentation and design documents

• Be a team player and a mentor, being available to support and grow the team when needed

Location: Onsite in Brussels, Belgium

Requirements

• Master’s degree (PhD+ preferred) in Computer Vision, Automation, Robotics, or equivalent

• At least 12 years of experience in relevant, industry or academy positions

• Proficiency with one production language (C++ or Rust) and one prototyping language (Python)

• Demonstrated ability to produce production-grade, highly optimized target code on resource constrained platforms

• Demonstrated ownership of complex, production-grade perception pipelines based on vision (IR and RGB) in commercial systems

• Experience with implementing and training machine learning models, including data quality topics

• Familiarity with ROS2 or iceoryx2

• Understanding of control systems and state estimation

• Experience with multi-modal sensor fusion (IMUs, radars, lasers, etc.)

• Excellent interpersonal communication skills in written and spoken English; French or Dutch is a plus

• You are a self-starter, able to work in a high-ambiguity environment and willing to take up new challenges

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with VIO/SLAM

• Experience with drones (quadcopters, fixed-wing) or homing missiles

• Experience with IR/thermal imaging and their calibration

• Previous experience in the defense industry

What we offer

• Attractive compensation

• Year-end bonus eligibility

• Stock Options Plan eligibility

• Mobility Budget

• 32 days of holidays

• Meal vouchers

• Private Health insurance

We are building a core team of hard-working people. If you want to join a company with tremendous impact and you are autonomous, creative and driven, we want to hear from you!

Sphere Defense offers attractive compensation, stock options, and a unique opportunity to change the global defense landscape.

This role is only open to candidates with right to work in Belgium. We cannot provide visa sponsorship at this time.