Location: Onsite — Austin, TX
Employment Type: Full-Time
Job Title: Senior Acoustic DSP & Real-Time Beamforming Engineer
Company Overview
We are a funded startup building autonomous machines for defense markets. Our first product is designed to counter small, fast FPV suicide drones. Our robots require world-class perception and decision-making. If you love turning cutting-edge algorithms into field-ready capability, this is your playground.
Position Summary
We are seeking a Senior Acoustic DSP & Real-Time Beamforming Engineer to own the stack that turns raw multichannel audio into reliable bearings and alerts. You will design algorithms to function in messy outdoor conditions, optimized for low-latency execution on edge hardware to ensure our systems react faster than the threat.
Essential Duties
Build the DSP Pipeline: Design and implement the full pipeline, including framing/STFT, filtering, coherence features, and noise/wind handling.
Implement Beamforming & DoA: Compare and deploy approaches like MUSIC, ESPRIT, and MVDR, selecting the best strategy based on real-world field metrics.
Hardware Partnership: Translate physical constraints (mic spacing, SNR limits) into algorithm decisions to ensure hardware and software are perfectly synced.
Create Evaluation Infrastructure: Curate datasets and build replay harnesses and error taxonomies to answer "why did it fail" with data-driven certainty.
Edge Optimization: Optimize for compute limits on CPU/GPU with deterministic behavior and robust fallbacks for high-stakes environments.
Requirements
Experience: Demonstrated success delivering real-world multichannel audio, radar, or sonar systems validated on messy, imperfect data.
Technical Depth: Strong beamforming/DoA fundamentals and sensitivity to calibration errors (phase errors, channel mismatch).
Coding: Proficiency in Python and C++/Rust with the ability to productize, profile, and optimize code.
Iteration: A mindset that iterates from measurements: logging → hypothesis → change → field verification.
Compliance: This position requires access to export-controlled information under ITAR. Only U.S. persons are permitted to access such information.
Background: Must be willing to submit to a background check.
Nice-to-Have
Embedded deployment experience (NVIDIA Jetson)
Acoustic tracking, temporal smoothing, or multi-source handling
Prior defense startup experience
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