Senior Autonomy Engineer, Opteran
£45-55k
Natural intelligence company
Job no longer available
Natural intelligence company
21-100 employees
Job no longer available
£45-55k
21-100 employees
Company mission
To translate our understanding of insect brains into a technology platform that will enable all manner of machines to see, sense, navigate and decide.
Role
Who you are
- A PhD in robotics, computer science, or related fields
- A strong understanding of autonomy algorithm design and implementation
- Extensive experience developing in C/C++
- An understanding of development in industry best-practice environments (version control / CI / agile)
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, and an ability to function effectively in a team
Desirable
- Commercial experience in C++
- Python experience
- Publications in well regarded and relevant academic journals/conferences, for example ICRA, IROS, RSS, CVPR
- Academic experience in biologically feasible autonomy algorithms, such as VPR or other biomimetic approaches to autonomy
- ROS/ROS2 development experience
- Experience in efficient implementation of algorithms for resource-constrained computer architectures
- OpenCL / FPGA development experience
- Experience using modern CMake
What the job involves
- Work on Opteran’s pioneering algorithms for perception, navigation, decision making, and action
- Build out the core features in our product roadmap to meet the needs of specific use cases
- Integrate Opteran’s autonomy stack into robots and test them in the real world
- Collaborate with our testing and simulation engineers to refine our algorithms performance across target use cases and quantify our operational envelope
- Rapidly prototype novel algorithms research to develop initial proofs of concept
- Use version control and documentation to manage project lifecycles
Salary benchmarks
Our take
Deep Learning methods have fast become the standard for moving towards machine autonomy, but the autonomy problem has already been solved to an astounding degree by natural systems – brains. Opteran has pioneered brain biomimicry, the ability to understand and re-engineer real brains, reproducing these biological systems to run on low-end silicon, which it calls “natural intelligence”.
Opteran, founded in 2020, began by investigating how insect brains see, navigate, avoid collisions, and make decisions. This was then mimicked and captured on silicon for use in machines, resulting in a product that is impressively small, lightweight, and does not require data; plus its orders of magnitude are more robust than current approaches. Opteran’s breakthrough technology could be employed across industrial, consumer and transport uses – from warehouse security to autonomous cars, to smart vacuums and lawnmowers.
Opteran has seen good levels of investment which will fund further development in its natural intelligence technology, as well as go towards opening offices and supporting customer pilots. Its current focus is natural brain decision-making for machines, with possible future expansion into computer vision and other decision-making applications.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Funding (2 rounds)
Jun 2022
$12m
EARLY VC
Nov 2020
$2.9m
SEED
Total funding: $14.9m
Company benefits
- 25 days holiday per year (plus 8 UK public holidays)
- Eligible for our employee equity scheme
- Flexible working hours; holiday swaps
- Team socials
- Salary sacrifice and 5% employee contribution to the company pension scheme
- Progressive leave policies
- Cycle to work scheme
Company HQ
Broomhall, Sheffield, UK
Leadership
David Rajan
(CEO)Founder and former Chairman of Centaur Robotics. Previously Director, VP and Partner at Marakon. Co-founded Union Network.
Alex Cope
(CTO)Former Research Fellow at The University of Sheffield, with a PhD which was based upon Computational Neuroscience and Biomimetic Robots.
James Marshall
(CSO)Former Professor of Theoretical and Computational Biology at The University of Sheffield. Previously Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, with prior experience as a Researcher.
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