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

About the interview

Application screen phone call (30 min)
Virtual interview with co-founder #1 (30 min via MS Teams)
Paid take-home ($500, ~4-8 hours)
Review work
Virtual interview with co-founder #2 (45 min via MS Teams)
In-person visit to Austin/Offer

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