Perception Engineer

About the Team

The Perception team is responsible for building the core vision and sensor fusion capabilities that enable our hardware to perceive and interact with the world in real time. We design, implement, and optimize perception pipelines that provide reliable inputs to planning and control systems, ensuring robust operation across diverse environments and conditions.

About the Role

As a Perception Engineer, you will develop and deploy state-of-the-art perception systems for real-time, closed-loop control. You’ll own the full stack from sensor ingest and calibration to on-device optimization and clean system interfaces, collaborating closely with camera, systems, and controls teams to ship features that perform reliably in the wild.

We’re looking for people who thrive at the intersection of computer vision, robotics, and systems engineering—engineers who can balance algorithmic depth with practical deployment on constrained hardware.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 4 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Design and implement perception pipelines for detection, tracking, segmentation, depth/optical flow, and scene understanding.

• Build robust sensor ingest systems including camera capture, IMU/time sync, buffering, and zero-copy data paths.

• Calibrate and fuse multimodal sensors (intrinsics, extrinsics, temporal sync) and implement state estimation (EKF/UKF, VIO/SLAM).

• Optimize on-device inference and vision kernels across CPU/GPU/NPU/ISP, with attention to quantization, compilation, and scheduling under power/thermal limits.

• Define clean interfaces to planning/control teams, specifying contracts, latency/throughput budgets, and fault-tolerant fallbacks.

• Instrument performance and reliability through profiling, telemetry, replayable logs, dataset curation, and automated regression testing (SIL/HIL).

• Collaborate cross-functionally with camera, systems, and controls engineers to ship features and triage field issues with root-cause fixes.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have deep experience building and shipping real-time perception for robots, mobile platforms, or edge devices.

• Are fluent in C++ and Python, with strong foundations in 3D geometry, camera models, probabilistic estimation, and computer vision/ML fundamentals.

• Have hands-on expertise with camera pipelines, sensor fusion, and calibration/time synchronization.

• Are skilled in deploying and optimizing ML models on resource-constrained devices.

• Know how to profile and tune systems for latency, memory, and power efficiency.

Bonus qualifications:

• Expertise in VIO/SLAM, mapping, and relocalization.

• Experience with depth/ranging modalities (stereo, ToF, LiDAR, structured light) and uncertainty-aware fusion.

• Familiarity with real-time media/compute pipelines (e.g., GStreamer, zero-copy).

• Experience designing for robustness in challenging conditions (motion blur, HDR/low light, occlusion, sensor faults).

• Knowledge of ROS 2, simulation frameworks for closed-loop evaluation, or HIL lab design.

• Contributions to open-source vision/perception stacks.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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