Senior Software Engineer - Edge Systems & Perception Infrastructure

At Orca AI Defense we build autonomous and AI-driven maritime systems for defense and government operators - perception, navigation and decision-making that run onboard, in real time, at sea, under conditions nobody controls.

We are hiring a Senior Software Engineer to build and own the software infrastructure behind our maritime perception systems. You will work across the full edge software stack, from sensor integration and real-time data pipelines to system architecture, hardware abstraction, deployment and communication between computing units.

You will face challenging problems involving embedded compute, high-bandwidth sensor data, timing, synchronization, resource constraints and distributed systems. Your software needs to perform reliably on a single edge device or across multiple interconnected units, adapting to different hardware configurations, sensors and operational environments. You own the infrastructure beyond the development environment, including how it behaves in the field and how it evolves across products and deployments.

What Will You Do?

• Own and develop the edge software infrastructure: architecture, hardware interfaces, data pipelines, configuration, resource management and fault handling
• Build reliable, high-performance software for real-time sensor acquisition, processing and data distribution across edge computing platforms
• Design and implement communication and synchronization between computing units, including shared sensor streams, time synchronization, data transport and fault recovery
• Develop modular and configurable software that supports different computing platforms, hardware configurations and product variants
• Optimize system performance on embedded Linux platforms, including CPU/GPU utilization, memory, latency, concurrency and communication bandwidth
• Own software deployment and release management: builds, packaging, versioning, remote updates, rollback and configuration management
• Build system monitoring, logging, recording and remote diagnostics, and work with algorithm and field teams on integration, sea trials and debugging real-world failures

• 5+ years of hands-on software engineering experience developing software that runs on embedded or edge hardware
• Strong C++ and Python development experience on Linux, including multithreading, concurrency and real-time systems
• Proven experience developing infrastructure for hardware-based systems, including sensor integration, data pipelines, communication and resource management
• Strong understanding of networking, inter-process communication, data transport and synchronization between processes or devices
• Experience integrating edge systems with cloud infrastructure, including networking, communication protocols and reliable data exchange
• Hands-on experience with system-level debugging, performance profiling and optimization on resource-constrained hardware
• Experience with software deployment, build systems, configuration management and diagnostics on operational devices
• A field mindset - willing to be on a boat!

Nice-To-Haves

• Computer vision or AI inference pipelines on edge compute (Jetson, x86)
• High-bandwidth camera and sensor interfaces, streaming and recording
• PTP, hardware timestamping and multi-sensor time synchronization
• Maritime, naval or marine systems

Challenges & Opportunities

• Own the software infrastructure behind a new generation of maritime perception products
• Solve complex real-time, performance and hardware integration challenges on operational edge systems
• Build the foundation that allows one software stack to run across different hardware platforms, sensors and system configurations
• Be on the boat for the whole path from first line of code to delivery
• Join a small, high-impact team working at the bleeding edge of autonomy and robotics