Senior / Staff LiDAR Perception Engineer
Munich, Germany · Full-time · Autonomous Aviation
About the Role
Join an early-stage aviation company at a pivotal moment — transitioning from prototype development to building its first operational aircraft. As a Senior / Staff LiDAR Perception Engineer, you'll define and build the LiDAR-based 3D perception stack from first principles, with significant ownership and direct impact on a real flying product.
What You'll Do
LiDAR Perception & Scene Understanding
You'll design and implement real-time LiDAR perception pipelines for onboard deployment, developing algorithms for 3D object detection and tracking, ground segmentation, surface estimation, and obstacle detection in unstructured environments. This includes building reliable landing zone detection for helipads, ship decks, and similar surfaces, while handling real-world challenges like point cloud sparsity, sensor noise, and dynamic scenes.
Sensor Fusion & State Estimation
You'll fuse LiDAR with cameras (RGB and thermal), IMU, and GNSS, contributing to 6-DoF pose estimation and localization while addressing sensor uncertainty and degraded conditions.
Autonomy Integration
Working at the interface of perception, navigation, and flight control, you'll integrate perception outputs into guidance and control systems to support precision landing and obstacle-aware navigation.
Real-Time Systems
You'll deploy pipelines on onboard compute hardware with strict latency and determinism requirements, designing modular, production-ready software architectures throughout.
Testing & Validation
You'll participate in flight testing and field campaigns, build evaluation frameworks and validation pipelines, and iterate on system performance using real-world data.
What We're Looking For
We're looking for someone with a background in robotics, autonomous systems, or 3D perception and hands-on experience deploying LiDAR systems in the real world.
Strong experience in point cloud processing, 3D detection, segmentation, and tracking is essential, along with familiarity with modern approaches such as voxel-based and BEV representations.
You should have experience fusing LiDAR with cameras, IMU, or GNSS — including calibration, coordinate frame management, and uncertainty handling — as well as strong C++ and Python skills and experience with ROS/ROS2. A track record of taking systems from prototype to production is expected.
Experience with UAVs, drones, or aviation systems is a plus, as is a background in safety-critical environments, simulation or synthetic data generation, and familiarity with real-time or embedded platforms.
The Opportunity
This is a greenfield role with minimal legacy constraints and direct cross-functional collaboration across perception, GNC, and hardware. You'll be solving one of autonomy's hardest problems — reliable operation in dynamic, uncertain environments — on a vehicle that actually flies.