Founding Computer Vision Engineer

Founding Computer Vision Engineer
📍 UK Remote with occasional travel to Swindon & potentially Kyiv/Oslo | 🕐 Full-time
💰 Up to £70,000 + 3% equity | Travel, housing & training covered

Build tech that saves lives.
I've partnered with an exciting mission led start-up. They're prototyping a solution that will directly save lives by fighting back against unmanned drone attacks. Their early in the journey, they have a mission, small team and basic prototype that they are still iterating. You'll be part of every aspect of design & development to bring this product to life over the next 6 months and production over the next 12 months.

They're building hand-launched micro-missiles to intercept drones at short range, small enough to fit in a vest, affordable enough for wide use, and fast enough to matter. Working directly with Ukrainian brigades and testing at a private UK site to build real hardware that stops drones from killing civilians.

We're now hiring a Founding Computer Vision Engineer to join the core team. You'll lead the development of vision-based target detection and tracking systems that operate in real-time and integrate directly into guidance and targeting hardware. This is a critical function in a product that needs to make split-second decisions in combat environments.

🔧 What you'll do:

• Design and implement real-time object detection and tracking pipelines
• Integrate vision systems with embedded hardware, flight controllers, and actuators
• Optimise for performance on edge devices (e.g. Jetson, FPGA, custom boards)
• Contribute to guidance, targeting, and seeker system design
• Support test rigs, SWIL/HWIL environments and live field testing

✅ What we're looking for:

• Solid background in computer vision and image processing
• Experience deploying CV systems on embedded platforms (Jetson, ARM, etc.)
• Skilled in Python, C++ and frameworks like OpenCV, TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc.
• Able to balance research-grade accuracy with real-time performance
• Comfortable working in a small, fast-paced team building real hardware
• Willing to work from Oslo, the UK or Kyiv and travel as needed

Bonus points for:

• Missile, drone, or aerospace targeting experience
• Experience with sensor fusion, SLAM, or control/autonomy
• Familiarity with GStreamer, MAVLink, or robotics simulation environments

🚀 Why join?

• Impact - Build frontline tech to save lives
• Ownership - We're still prototyping, you can be a huge part of the design journey
• Team - Work with experts from Stanford, Imperial, & special forces
• Support - Salary, all travel expenses + 3% equity, any training covered

This is not a research role. This is building, testing, iterating - fast.

If you're an engineering whizz, ambitious, love a challenge and want your work to have some real-world impact that you can be proud of. Apply or give me a call.

Spectrum IT Recruitment (South) Limited is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.