Senior Perception Engineer - Robotics

Senior Perception Engineer - Robotics Work location: Union City, CA [Hybrid] Third Wave Automation (TWA) is a rapidly growing startup that has demonstrated its core technology components, proven its market fit, and just closed its Series C funding. If you are excited about cutting edge machine learning, robotics that affects the real world, and want to join a company where your skills can have a huge impact, you’ll fit right in. TWA is applying modern machine learning to materials handling—delivering site-specific forklift navigation and infrastructure-free pallet handling that continuously adapts to changing floor configuration and warehouse demand. We are looking for senior and principal level Robotics Engineers with strong Perception Engineering expertise to help advance the automation stack for our autonomous forklifts. As TWA expands with successful customer deployments, we are adding engineers who can improve the reliability, accuracy, and robustness of our perception systems in real-world warehouse environments. This role will focus heavily on sensor processing, perception pipelines, object detection and tracking, environmental understanding, localization support, and perception-to-planning integration. The ideal candidate has hands-on experience building perception capabilities for deployed robotic systems and is comfortable working across adjacent areas such as prediction, motion planning, vehicle behavior, and system-level debugging. You will be part of a core team working to pioneer new solutions while also driving product maturity to support our rapid growth projections. We empower our team with an AI-first engineering culture, leveraging LLMs and generative tools to accelerate problem-solving, automate the mundane, and allow engineers to focus on the high-level architectural, safety, and reliability challenges unique to autonomous robotics. How You Can Make An Impact Own and improve core perception capabilities: Design, implement, and optimize perception algorithms that enable autonomous forklifts to reliably understand and operate in dynamic warehouse environments. Develop robust sensor processing pipelines: Work with data from LiDAR, vision, and other onboard sensors to improve detection, classification, tracking, segmentation, and environmental modeling. Improve perception performance in real-world conditions: Address noise, occlusion, sensor uncertainty, edge cases, dynamic obstacles, reflective surfaces, lighting variation, and other challenges common in warehouse and industrial environments. Integrate perception with planning and autonomy systems: Ensure perception outputs are accurate, timely, and usable by downstream planning, prediction, localization, vehicle command, and safety systems. Drive product maturity through deployed robotics: Translate field data, customer deployment learnings, and system failures into measurable improvements in perception reliability, autonomy performance, and customer outcomes. Build in an AI-first engineering environment: Leverage AI-assisted development tools such as Cursor, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, and LLM-based workflows to accelerate prototyping, testing, debugging, documentation, and code generation. Debug complex autonomy issues end-to-end: Investigate perception-driven autonomy failures, reproduce field issues, analyze logs and sensor data, and collaborate across robotics disciplines to identify root causes. Influence technical direction: Help shape the roadmap for perception and autonomy improvements as a key member of a small, empowered engineering team. Mentor and raise the technical bar: Provide technical leadership, contribute original ideas, mentor junior engineers, and help establish best practices for perception development, testing, and deployment. Basic Qualifications At least 7+ years of industry experience with a Bachelor’s Degree in Robotics, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline. At least 5+