Founding Computer Vision & Perception Engineer

Location: San Francisco

1. About the Company

TerraWise is building autonomous ground robotics and AI to power the next generation of utility-scale solar operations. As solar deployments scale rapidly, maintaining vast, remote infrastructure has become a critical challenge. Today’s O&M teams rely on labor-intensive inspections and fragmented data to keep sites running. TerraWise changes that by deploying rugged autonomous rovers paired with a real-time intelligence platform that continuously monitors assets, detects issues early, and delivers actionable insights. Our mission is to augment field teams; improving uptime, safety, and efficiency while reducing operational costs.

We’re a venture-backed, Seed-stage deep-tech startup at the intersection of robotics, AI, and clean energy, building systems designed to operate in harsh real-world environments, solving real problems for a positive impact. If you want to work on technology that directly accelerates the world’s transition to renewable energy, we’d love to talk.

2. About the Role

What you’ll do

• Build and own the end-to-end perception pipeline: sensor ingestion, calibration, fusion, and inference.
• Design and train models for object detection, semantic/instance segmentation, multi-object tracking, 3D reconstruction tasks
• Own full model lifecycles: dataset curation, labeling strategy, training, evaluation, and continuous improvement
• Close the loop from robot sensors → CV inference → actionable insights on TerraWise's customer platform.

Requirements

• M.S. or Ph.D. in CS/EE/Robotics focused on Computer Vision and AI, or equivalent industry experience
• 2–4+ yrs building and deploying CV/perception systems in production or research
• Strong programming background with Python, Pytorch, Tensorflow, and other ML tools
• Hands-on experience with multimodal sensing (thermal, RGB, depth, point cloud, etc.) including cross-modal fusion and calibration
• Proven ability to build reliable models with limited labeled data with few-shot, semi-supervised, or self-supervised approaches
• Experience working with foundation models, VLMs
• Experience with Docker, AWS, SSH, CI/CD pipelines
• Ability to read, implement, and adapt SOTA methods from recent CV literature; stays current with the latest research and publications.

Bonus skills

• Robotics: ROS, C++
• Simulation: Gazebo, MuJoCo, IsaacSim

3. Benefits and Pay

• $125,000-$175,000 base salary
• Benefits: Health insurance, Gym membership, office lunches, etc.
• 0.25-1% equity on a standard 4-year vesting schedule with a 1-year cliff (stock options value $100K+)
• Start date: April 2026