Senior Embedded Software Engineer - Inference AI/ML

Allen Control Systems is a defense startup developing autonomous gun turrets using computer vision and control systems. The company is seeking a Senior Embedded Software Engineer to deploy and optimize trained AI/ML models on resource-constrained edge hardware, build supporting C++ infrastructure, and collaborate with machine learning, embedded, firmware, hardware, and product teams. Responsibilities Apply quantization, pruning, knowledge distillation, operator fusion, and graph optimization to shrink models and reduce inference cost while protecting accuracy; convert trained models into edge-deployable formats using ONNX and TensorRTProfile inference on target accelerators including GPUs, NPUs, DSPs, and FPGAs; measure latency, throughput, memory footprint, and power consumption, then drive the changes needed to hit performance targetsDesign, write, and maintain the C++ application code that hosts inference on device, including pre- and post-processing pipelines, data and memory management, threading, and interfaces to the rest of the embedded system; ensure the combined model and C++ stack meets real-time constraints and fits within device memory budgetBuild test harnesses to verify on-device accuracy against reference results and catch regressions from optimization or quantization; contribute to tooling for packaging, versioning, and delivering model updates to deployed devicesSet best practices for edge deployment, review designs and code, and mentor other engineers on optimization and embedded ML techniques; work closely with research, firmware, and product teams to set realistic performance targets and feed hardware constraints back into model design