Lead Perception Engineer (m/f/d)

Location: Berlin, Germany

Type: Full-time, Permanent

We’re working with an ambitious autonomous mobility company developing advanced technology for Level 4 autonomous driving. They’re building a safety-focused software platform designed for real-world deployment, bringing together perception, machine learning and high-performance robotics software.

They’re now looking for a hands-on technical leader to shape the architecture of their perception and autonomous systems stack, combining deep C++ expertise with computer vision, GPU acceleration and production machine learning.

The Role

You’ll lead technical direction across perception and autonomous systems while remaining closely involved in implementation. With around 50% of your time dedicated to hands-on engineering, you’ll make key architectural decisions, solve complex technical challenges and help a specialist team deliver high-performance, real-time software.

Key Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction, architecture and engineering standards for a real-time C++ software stack, including ROS 2 nodes and perception pipelines.
• Lead the development of computer vision and image processing systems, combining classical methods with CPU and CUDA-based acceleration.
• Oversee the integration and deployment of machine learning models, including inference optimisation, quantisation and runtime performance.
• Drive software architecture decisions across autonomous systems, considering safety, reliability and SOTIF principles.
• Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews and support complex implementation and design decisions.
• Collaborate with adjacent engineering teams and contribute to field testing, system validation and experimental development.
• Improve scalable data processing pipelines and support the development of robust machine learning workflows.

Skills & Experience

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Vision or a related discipline.
• 4+ years of professional experience in modern C++ development for high-performance or real-time systems.
• 4+ years of experience across machine learning engineering, computer vision or production ML deployment.
• Strong expertise in software architecture, ROS 2, performance optimisation and classical computer vision.
• Experience taking technical ownership of complex systems, setting engineering direction and mentoring developers.
• Several years of experience with data engineering or scalable data processing pipelines.
• Experience with CUDA, GPU programming, MLOps, TensorRT or ONNX Runtime is advantageous.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to lead technically while remaining hands-on.
• Fluent English; German is advantageous.

What’s on Offer

• The opportunity to influence the architecture of advanced autonomous mobility technology.
• A hands-on technical leadership role with meaningful ownership over core engineering decisions.
• A collaborative, international engineering environment tackling complex real-world challenges.
• Flexible working hours and support for professional development and further training.
• Public transport subsidy and additional employee benefits.
• A Berlin-based team environment with regular in-person collaboration.

If you’re an experienced C++ engineer with a background in perception, computer vision or autonomous systems and want to combine technical leadership with hands-on development, we’d be keen to speak with you.