Perception Simulation Engineer II/III
At Zone 5 Technologies, we're redefining what's possible in unmanned aircraft systems. Our team of engineers and innovators is developing cutting-edge autonomous solutions that push the boundaries of UAS technology - solving complex challenges that matter. We're building the future of UAS capabilities, and we're looking for exceptional talent to join us. If you're driven by hard problems, energized by rapid innovation, and ready to make an impact on next-generation flight systems, you belong here.We are looking for a Perception Simulation Engineer to build the sensor-simulation and synthetic-data backbone of our Unreal Engine simulation environment. Where a general mission-simulation engineer builds worlds and vehicle dynamics, this role is focused specifically on making simulated perception good enough to develop and validate real perception and target-tracking software before flight — high-fidelity RGB and thermal (IR) camera models, sensor feeds streamed onto ROS 2 topics, and synthetic data pipelines that feed our detection, tracking, and Target State Estimation (TSE) stacks. You will work at the seam between the Unreal Engine and perception pipelines, turning "we can render a scene" into "we can trust the perception numbers coming out of the sim." This is a foundational effort. We welcome both generalists and specialists—you do not need every skill listed below. Responsibilities: Synthetic Sensor Modeling (core of the role) Build high-fidelity RGB and long-wave IR (thermal) camera models in Unreal Engine, and render both views from platform-mounted cameras. Tune simulated camera output to match (or closely approximate) real-world camera performance — FOV, resolution, framerate, thermal response — driven by the specs of the sensors we actually fly (e.g. FLIR Boson / Boson+ LWIR). Implement realistic sensor noise, artifacts, motion blur, and failure modes so perception software is tested against hard cases, not clean renders. Support camera articulation independent of vehicle orientation (gimbal/boresight), so control-envelope requirements can be derived directly from camera specs. ROS 2 Integration Publish simulated camera imagery and sensor data onto ROS 2 topics using the shared strive_msgs / strive_interfaces contracts, so the same interface serves sim and hardware. Implement and test developer contracts and fulfill deterministic simulation requirements. Feed the perception pipeline and downstream Target State Estimation (TSE) with simulated sensor streams and ground-truth labels for evaluation. Synthetic Data & Target Simulation Build synthetic-data generation and export pipelines (imagery + bounding boxes / segmentation / range + pose ground truth) suitable for training and evaluating detection, tracking, and TSE models. Implement target i...