Senior Perception Software Engineer at Seasats
San Diego, CA
$180,000–$250,000
Jul 29, 2026
San Diego, CA
Sep 24, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual-contributor role at an autonomous maritime robotics company, focused on building and owning the full perception stack for unmanned surface vehicles operating at sea. Day-to-day work spans designing detection, tracking, and sensor-fusion algorithms; integrating classical and ML-based approaches; optimizing for embedded real-time hardware; and validating against live ocean conditions. Suits an experienced robotics/perception engineer with a strong background in camera, radar, or LiDAR pipelines on compute-constrained platforms.
Senior level · 7+ years · San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA · Full-time
Pay in the description: $180,000–$250,000
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How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 2 people in the San Diego-Chula Vista-Carlsbad, CA area plausibly meet what this posting asks for (data scientists). range 1–4
Applicant volume Light — Few people clear these requirements, so an application that does clear them gets looked at. Worth applying to even if you miss a nice-to-have.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $133,871 (middle half $95,474–$167,770). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Aug 1, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (7)
The posting requires 7+ years of overall software engineering experience AND 4+ years specifically on perception problems in fielded systems; the overall years minimum reflects the overall gate of 7 years.
Camera and radar are both called out as primary sensor modalities; LiDAR is listed alongside them as an 'and/or' option, so it is captured as an alternative to camera processing rather than a separate hard gate.
ML model integration is required (the role must 'integrate ML models into the perception pipeline'), but training or fine-tuning ML models is explicitly listed under 'nice to have' — these are treated separately.
GPU/native acceleration (CUDA, CuPy, Numba) and ROS are listed under the 'nice (though not essential)' section and are marked preferred accordingly.
The posting notes export-control restrictions: only U.S. persons (citizens, lawful permanent residents, asylees, or refugees) are eligible — no formal security clearance is required, but candidates must qualify as U.S. persons under export control law.
Compensation includes stock options and 401k matching in addition to the stated salary range; those are not captured in the comp fields, which reflect base salary only.
Ignored 1 non-technology phrase(s) as skills (responsibilities/concepts, not named tools): embedded/real-time systems.
Read the full posting
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