Embedded System Lead Engineer

About the role

Pelagon is seeking an Embedded System Lead Engineer to take end-to-end technical ownership of the hardware, electronics, and embedded stack for autonomous maritime platforms. You will lead the architecture, component selection, and integration of systems designed to operate in harsh marine environments while running high-performance AI models on a limited power budget. This role involves hands-on development from initial prototyping through to sea trials and deployment.

Responsibilities

• Define common system architecture across platforms including power, sensing, compute, and communications.
• Select and integrate processors and accelerators for edge-AI compute to maximize inference efficiency.
• Design and integrate electronics including power distribution, battery systems, motor control, and sensor interfaces.
• Develop embedded software, firmware, and autopilot stacks for reliable autonomy.
• Engineer for robustness and efficiency regarding watertight integrity, thermal behavior, and failure modes.
• Conduct hands-on bring-up and sea trials, and manage vendor and component selection.

Required skills

• Embedded systems
• Electronics design
• Power systems
• Motor control
• Sensor integration
• Embedded Linux
• Firmware
• Autopilot
• ArduPilot
• PX4
• Edge AI
• Model quantization

Nice to have

• Mechanical engineering
• Mechatronics
• Subsea hardware
• Marine hardware
• CFD
• Hydrodynamics

Qualifications

• 5+ years building real, shipping hardware
• Direct experience building drones or autonomous systems

Benefits

• Equity

About the Company

Pelagon is a deeptech startup building a foundational multimodal acoustic model for autonomous maritime protection in service of European sovereignty. The company is backed by Hexa, a European startup studio.