Job VC

About us
DroneOps is a company creating innovative UAV-related products, focused on UAV autonomy and navigation, founded in 2023. We are a team of innovators and inventors who take on the duty to help the armed forces of Ukraine defend our country and democracy by providing reliable advanced systems that simplify their work, improve personnel safety, and enable more cost-effective and precise UAV mission execution.

Overview
We are looking for a
Middle / Senior Computer Vision / Deep Learning Engineer
to extend our onboard navigation capabilities with modern perception and learning-based methods.
This is a hands-on R&D role: you work from research and prototypes to production on edge hardware, collaborate with software, and flight teams, and help shape how new CV/DL features are built and shipped. The role suits someone who can follow state-of-the-art work, implement what fits our constraints, and care about real-world performance—not only offline benchmarks.

Responsibilities

Relocalization & navigation
Design and develop satellite, map, and semantic navigation capabilities that improve the overall quality of our navigation
Build and maintain pipelines for map and reference-data preparation before missions
Extend the existing visual-inertial navigation stack with relocalization and map-based aiding features
Develop training pipelines for these tasks (data preparation, training, evaluation, and iteration)
Create utilities that make map preloading and mission setup convenient for operators and integrators

Research & implementation
Track relevant research and industry approaches; prototype and adopt methods where they clearly improve the product
Reimplement or adapt algorithms when off-the-shelf solutions do not fit our data, hardware, or latency requirements
Define evaluation metrics and acceptance criteria for new features before field and deployment rollouts

Edge deployment & production
Optimize models and inference for target onboard hardware
Integrate new features into the production codebase with stable APIs, logging, and failure handling
Take part in architecture decisions, code review, and team practices that keep production quality high as the stack grows

Required skills & experience
3+ years of practical experience in computer vision and deep learning
Strong Python; ability to write clear, maintainable code for experiments and production paths
Experience with training and deploying deep learning models (PyTorch)
Familiarity with model optimization for edge or embedded devices (pruning, quantization, ONNX/TensorRT-class tooling, or equivalent)
Comfort working with geospatial or map-related data and preprocessing pipelines
Practical production mindset: reproducible experiments, versioning, and validation on real data
English B2+ for documentation and technical discussion; Ukrainian for day-to-day team communication

Nice to have
Experience with deep learning keypoint detection and matching approaches
Comfortable with geometric computer vision (camera models, epipolar geometry, robust estimation)
Multi-sensor fusion / SLAM / EKF background
UAV, robotics, or aerospace field experience
Experience with satellite or aerial imagery, semantic segmentation, or visual place recognition

What we offer
Competitive salary
Reservation from mobilization
Impact on improving our country's defense capabilities
21 days of vacation + public holidays, sick leaves