Founding Engineer – Space Perception & Autonomy

Location: Bengaluru

Experience: 46 years

About Zoove Space

Zoove Space is building end-to-end spacecraft systems to make Low Earth Orbit (LEO) safe, survivable, and sustainable.

As orbital congestion increases, enabling autonomous, reliable, and continuous in-orbit maneuvers is highly crucial. Zooves approach focuses on designing spacecraft and mission systems that integrate perception, decision-making, and control into a unified operational architecture.

This enables spacecraft to operate with increasing levels of autonomy in dynamic and uncertain environments.

Role Overview

The Founding Engineer Space Perception & Autonomy will take ownership of the perception and decision-making layer of Zooves mission systems.

This role is responsible for developing algorithms and systems that enable the spacecraft to understand its environment, process data, and make operational decisions, working in close integration with orbital dynamics and GNC systems.

This is a founding-level role with scope equivalent to a technical co-founder, involving ownership of core system architecture, technical direction, and mission-critical capabilities.

Ideal Candidate

• Demonstrated ability to independently design and build complex systems from first principles
• Strong expertise in algorithms, data structures, and computational problem-solving
• Experience working with real-world, uncertain, or noisy datasets
• Ability to combine model-driven (CV/ML) and deterministic approaches effectively
• High ownership mindset with the ability to operate in an unstructured environment

Roles & Responsibilities

• Design and implement perception and data processing pipelines for space-based or sensor-driven systems
• Develop algorithms for detection, tracking, classification, and data association
• Build decision-making systems that translate perception outputs into actionable mission inputs
• Work closely with the Orbital Dynamics & GNC engineer to enable closed-loop autonomy.
• Develop scalable pipelines for handling spatial-temporal datasets
• Identify computational and data-access bottlenecks and optimize accordingly
• Apply efficient data structures and algorithm fundamentals
• Apply CV/ML techniques ensuring robustness and operational relevance
• Implement parallelization strategies (CPU/GPU) where required
• Establish benchmarking, profiling, and validation frameworks
• Develop testing mechanisms to ensure correctness and reliability of outputs
• Document system design, trade-offs, and evolution

Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field
• 46 years of experience in algorithms, perception systems, data processing, or related domains
• Strong understanding of algorithms and data structures for large-scale or real-time systems
• Proficiency in Python, C/C++, CUDA and familiarity with performance-oriented tools.
• Experience working with real-world datasets with noise, sparsity, or uncertainty
• Familiarity with numerical methods, linear algebra, and precision management

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in computer vision, remote sensing, or sensor data processing
• Familiarity with spatial, temporal, or graph-based computational problems
• Exposure to aerospace systems, robotics, or autonomous systems
• Experience with parallel computing or GPU-accelerated pipelines
• Familiarity with machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch)
• Experience working in simulation-heavy or high-performance computing environments

Founding Role Expectations

• Ownership of a core system layer from inception through deployment
• Active involvement in defining system architecture and long-term technical direction
• Ability to operate with ambiguity and evolving problem statements
• Close collaboration with founders on product, system design, and roadmap
• Contribution to building the engineering culture and technical foundation of the company

General Requirements

• Strong analytical thinking and problem-solving capability
• Ability to independently own and drive complex technical problems
• Ability to collaborate across interdisciplinary domains
• Strong documentation and communication skills
• High ownership mindset and accountability in mission-critical systems

Note on Role Scope

This role is positioned as a founding technical role with long-term ownership of the autonomy layer of the spacecraft system. The expectations, responsibility, and impact are aligned with that of a technical co-founder, and the compensation structure reflects a combination of salary and meaningful equity participation.