Embedded System Lead Engineer

About the role

As the Embedded System Lead Engineer, you will take end-to-end technical ownership of the hardware, electronics, and embedded stack for a family of autonomous maritime platforms. You will lead the technical development from architecture and component selection through to integration and sea trials. Your work will focus on designing compute-and-power architectures that enable high-performance AI models to run on-device within strict energy budgets.

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 in harsh environments.
• Engineer for robustness and efficiency, addressing thermal behavior, watertight integrity, and power endurance.
• Conduct hands-on bring-up and sea trials, managing vendor decisions and scaling manufacturing practices.

Required skills

• Embedded systems
• Electronics design
• Power systems
• Motor control
• Sensor integration
• Microcontrollers
• Embedded Linux
• Firmware
• Autopilot
• Edge AI
• Machine learning
• Model quantization

Nice to have

• Mechatronics
• Marine hardware
• Subsea hardware
• CFD
• Hydrodynamics

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience 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. Backed by the startup studio Hexa, the company develops autonomous networks of vectors to provide real-time understanding of underwater threats.