Perception Engineer

 ABOUT KOVARI

Kovari develops frontier technology to transform physical businesses. They partner with established operators to change how they run, and build and operate businesses of their own through their subsidiaries.

Kovari is a small team of builders, operators, and researchers. They deploy on-site alongside the businesses they serve and iterate in the field. The company has raised over $6M from leading investors and is based in San Francisco.

 

THE OPPORTUNITY

You will own the perception stack end to end, from raw sensor data to the representations used by learned policies and classical control. Your systems run on deployed robots and handle the messy realities of the field: variable lighting, glass and reflective surfaces, temporary obstacles, and repetitive architecture.

 

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Build sensor fusion across cameras, depth, IMU, and proprioception
• Own calibration, time synchronization, and sensor health monitoring
• Develop localization, mapping, and scene understanding for real environments
• Build detection, segmentation, and 3D representations for manipulation and navigation
• Optimize perception for real-time inference on edge hardware
• Debug field failures and drive fixes back into models and data

 

YOU SHOULD HAVE

• Strong background in computer vision and 3D geometry
• Experience shipping perception on real robots or vehicles
• Experience with SLAM, state estimation, or multi-sensor fusion
• Strong C++ and Python; PyTorch for learned components
• Experience with edge inference tools such as TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, or similar
• A bias toward action: test early, measure, fix what breaks

 

NICE TO HAVE

• Publications at CVPR, ICRA, CoRL, RSS, or similar venues