Embedded System Lead Engineer

About the Company

About the Role

Responsibilities

• ● tion through bring-up, integration, sea trials, and iteration. You'll set the engineering bar for the platforms team and shape how we build for years to come.
• ● These platforms exist to carry one thing into the water: our AI. Pelagon trains high-performance detection models in-house on its own stack, and those models have to run on-device, at the edge, on a razor-thin power budget - then push results back to our operations center. 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. The hardware is the gate to all of it.
• ● WHAT YOU'LL OWN
• ● 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, and 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 brutal, wet, salty environment.
• ● Robustness and efficiency engineering: watertight integrity, power budgets and 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 BE SOLVING
• ● These are genuinely difficult, and that's the point:
• ● Persistence with a finite power budget. Endurance is everything for a surveillance node - squeezing weeks of useful operation out of a sealed, ship-deployable platform is a relentless optimization problem across power, compute, and duty-cycling.
• ● Reliability with no one to fix it. A system at sea has to fail safe and recover on its own. There is no field technician at 30 nm offshore in a 2 m swell.
• ● Running real AI at the edge, on almost no power. This is the defining challenge of the role. Our in-house models have to run inference on-device, in real time, on platforms with a razor-thin energy budget - then sense, sleep, and wake intelligently to stretch endurance from hours into weeks. Getting high-performance ML to live within milliwatts is what makes the entire system possible.
• ● Sensing in a hostile medium. The ocean fights you at every turn - pressure, corrosion, biofouling, acoustic noise, intermittent comms - and the hardware has to keep sensing and computing through all of it.
• ● Speed without fragility. We are building fast toward sea trials, but a demonstrator that breaks doesn't generate data. You'll have to find the line between moving quickly and building things that survive the ocean.
• ● WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR
• ● You are a sharp, senior builder who wants to own a problem, not be handed a ticket. Specifically:

Benefits

• ● 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. This is 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, in the real world. We train our own models and run them where it counts: in the water, on the device. You'll be solving the edge-ML and power problems most companies only talk about.
• ● A sovereign, European deeptech at the inflection point of a market with strong NATO and EU policy momentum behind it.