Embedded System Lead Engineer

As Embedded System Lead Engineer, you take end-to-end technical ownership of the hardware, electronics, and embedded stack across a small family of autonomous maritime platforms — some operating on the surface, some beneath it.What they share matters more than what sets them apart: each must persist at sea for long stretches, sense its surroundings, run our AI on-device, and report back intelligently — all while surviving a brutal environment on a very tight energy budget.These platforms exist to carry one thing into the water: our AI. Pelagon trains high-performance detection models in-house, and those models have to run on-device, at the edge, on a razor-thin power budget. Designing the compute-and-power architecture that makes this possible is the heart of the role.The mandate is simple and uncompromising: get reliable hardware in the water fast, and start collecting data. Every week of persistent at-sea operation compounds.Common system architecture across the platforms: power, sensing, compute, and communications.The edge-AI compute platform — selecting and integrating the processors and accelerators that run our in-house detection models on-device, extracting maximum inference from every milliwatt.Electronics design and integration — power distribution, battery systems, motor/thruster control, sensor interfaces (acoustic, pressure, IMU, GNSS, AIS).The embedded software and autopilot stack, firmware, and the low-level glue that makes autonomy reliable in a wet, salty environment.Robustness and efficiency engineering: watertight integrity, power budgets, endurance, thermal behaviour, EMC, and graceful failure modes far from shore.Hands-on bring-up and sea trials — you'll be on the dock and on the boat, not just at the bench.Vendor and component decisions, and the build-up of our test and manufacturing practices as we scale from prototype to fielded units.The hard problems you'll solvePersistence with a finite power budget: squeezing weeks of useful operation out of a sealed, ship-deployable platform.Reliability with no one to fix it: a system at sea has to fail safe and recover on its own — there's no technician 30 nm offshore in a 2 m swell.Running real AI at the edge, on almost no power: real-time inference on-device, then sensing, sleeping, and waking intelligently to stretch endurance from hours into weeks.Sensing in a hostile medium: pressure, corrosion, biofouling, acoustic noise, intermittent comms — the hardware has to keep computing through all of it.Speed without fragility: moving fast toward sea trials, while building things that survive the ocean.Who we're looking forYou're a sharp, senior builder who wants to own a problem, not be handed a ticket.5+ years building real, shipping hardware — embedded systems that had to be efficient, robust, and survive the real world.Direct experience building drones or autonomous systems (drone companies, automotive / autonomous vehicles, or the marine autonomy space).Deep, hands-on command of the full embedded stack: electronics design, power systems, motor/actuator control, sensor integration, microcontrollers and embedded Linux, and firmware close to the metal.Comfort with autopilot / flight-controller ecosystems (Pixhawk, ArduPilot / ArduSub / PX4 or equivalent) and the realities of real-time control.Experience deploying AI/ML models at the edge — embedded inference, accelerators (GPU / NPU / TPU-class), model quantization, and the power-versus-performance tradeoffs that come with it.A bias toward action: you prototype, test, break, and iterate, and you're energized by tight deadlines and a mission that genuinely matters.Bonus points for mechanical / mechatronic breadth (hulls, sealing, and thrust as well as circuits), subsea or marine hardware experience, comms in degraded environments, CFD or hydrodynamics intuition, or having taken a hardware product from zero to fielded at scale.Founding ownership: you'll be one of the first engineers and will define the technical foundation of the company. Meaningful equity comes with that.A mission with weight: hardware that protects critical infrastructure and Europe's maritime space.Real things, in the real ocean, fast: you'll see your work in the water within weeks, not years.AI-first, at the edge: we train our own models and run them where it counts — in the water, on the device.A sovereign European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with strong NATO and EU policy momentum behind it.Why join nowFounding ownership: you'll be one of the first engineers and will define the technical foundation of the company. Meaningful equity comes with that.A mission with weight: hardware that protects critical infrastructure and Europe's maritime space.Real things, in the real ocean, fast: you'll see your work in the water within weeks, not years.AI-first, at the edge: we train our own models and run them where it counts — in the water, on the device.A sovereign European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with strong NATO and EU policy momentum behind it. #J-18808-Ljbffr