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 neededBonus 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 coveredThis 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