Senior Perception Software Engineer at Pickle Robot Company (Charlestown, MA)Senior Perception Software Engineer

At Pickle Robot, we're on a mission to automate global supply chains with Physical AI. Our robots work alongside warehouse teams to unload trucks and containers — one of the toughest, most understaffed jobs in logistics — making the work safer, faster, and more efficient for the people doing it.  Loading trucks comes next, followed by the Dill Autonomy Engine: generalized autonomy that will eventually orchestrate robots across entire logistics processes.

We're looking for a dynamic, driven Senior Perception Software Engineer to help revolutionize the future of warehouse automation. This role will focus heavily on working with 3D LiDAR and other multi-sensor arrays to tackle complex challenges in state estimation, scene perception, mapping, and localization. You will play a crucial part in writing robust, production-grade software that translates raw sensor data into actionable intelligence for our robots operating in dynamic, real-world unloading docks.

- Drive the accuracy and precision of our localization and state estimation pipelines. Ensure reliable pose estimation of the robot's mobile base and scene components.

- Develop advanced obstacle mapping for collision avoidance that thrives in messy environments.

- Implement and optimize point cloud processing algorithms tailored for real-time edge compute.

- Architect a robust software stack that efficiently parses and interfaces with the outputs of our machine learning models, integrating novel perception pipelines seamlessly into the core production codebase.

- Improve and automate multi-sensor calibration routines. You will manage tolerance stacks and ensure high-fidelity spatial alignment across our sensor suites, guaranteeing a single source of truth for the robot.

- 5+ years of experience in robotics software engineering (or an MS with 3+ years of highly relevant industry experience).

- Exceptional software engineering fundamentals, highly proficient in Python and C++ for production systems.

- Strong mathematical foundation in linear algebra, geometry, and probabilistic robotics.

- Hands-on experience building perception stacks using industry-standard tools and frameworks, including ROS/ROS2, OpenCV, Open3D, Eigen, and Git.

- Hands-on experience with sensor stacks including 3D LiDARs, IMUs, and cameras.

- You are a "full-stack" robotics engineer who cares about accuracy, precision, and edge cases in the physical world and can articulate architectural trade-offs to drive the best system-level decisions.

- Nice to have: Experience with optimization libraries (Ceres Solver, GTSAM), parallel computing (CUDA), Docker, and PCL.

- Location Requirement: This role is on-site at our HQ, working directly with the physical sensor rigs and robots.